Doing English: A Guide for Literature Students 9781351707527, 1351707523

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
A note for students
A note for teachers and academics
Part 1 How We Read
Chapter 1 Studying English
Who is this book for?
1: Reading is active
2: English is a discipline
3: English is controversial
4: English is constantly changing
How to use this book
Summary
Chapter 2 Where did English come from?
Beginning the conversation
Before English: The nineteenth century
How modern English began
The ‘Leavis method’
Summary
Chapter 3 Studying English today
Changing world, changing English
Using theory
Summary
Chapter 4 The discipline of English
What is a discipline, anyway?
Problems in English and ‘disciplinary consciousness’
Conclusion
Summary
Chapter 5 Critical attitudes
Intrinsic attitudes: Into the text
Extrinsic attitudes: Out of the text
Contrasting these two attitudes
Summary
Part 2 What We Read
Chapter 6 Literature, value and the canon
Can literature be defined?
What is the canon?
How does the canon affect you?
Canons tomorrow?
Summary
Chapter 7 Castle Shakespeare
Shakespeare the Star: The traditionalists’ argument
Shakespeare the Black Hole: The cultural materialists’ argument
Traditionalists and iconoclasts in other debates
Is Shakespeare ‘simply the best’?
Does Shakespeare teach values?
The effects of this debate on studying Shakespeare
Traditionalists and iconoclasts in other debates
Conclusion
Summary
Part 3 Reading, writing and meaning
Chapter 8 The author is dead?
How important is the author in deciding what awork of literature means?
For authorial intention: The authority of the author
1. Meaning
2. Biographical evidence
3. Authorial presence
4. Simple evaluation
Against authorial intention: The death of the author
1. Meaning: Is literature a code?
2. Biographical evidence
3. Authorial presence
4. Simple evaluation
So why has the author always seemed so important?
Consequences of the death of the author
Summary
Chapter 9 Metaphors and figures of speech
Figures of speech everywhere
Metaphors in literature
Metaphors in everyday speech
Basic conceptual metaphors
What metaphors mean and how they shape the world
Summary
Chapter 10 Narrative and closure
How are narratives made?
Narrators
Closure
Summary
Chapter 11 Creative writing and critical rewriting
What is creative writing?
Nuts and Bolts Assessment
Creative English?
Summary
Part 4 English and you
Chapter 12 English, politics and identity
English and the polis
Critical attitudes and politics
The extrinsic attitude: Literature as politics?
The intrinsic attitude: Literature versus politics?
Where does your communal identity come from?
English as cultural heritage
Why has English been a political battleground?
Summary
Chapter 13 Why study English?
What’s the use of ‘use’?
The values of English
‘My degree taught me skills?’
Conclusion
Summary
Conclusion: The importance of English
Further reading
1 Studying English
2 Where did English come from?
3 Studying English today
5 Critical attitudes
6 Literature, value and the canon
7 Castle Shakespeare
8 The author is dead?
9 Metaphors and figures of speech
10 Narrative and closure
12 English, politics and identity
13 Why study English?
Conclusion
Index

Citation preview

Doing English

Doing English presents the ideas and debates that shape how we ‘do’ English today, explaining arguments about the value of literature, the canon, Shakespeare, theory, politics and the subject itself. In his lucid and engaging style, Robert Eaglestone: ·· orients students by encouraging them to think about what they are doing when they study literature; • bridges the gap between English at A-level and International Baccalaureate to English in Higher Education by exploring traditional and theoretical approaches to literature and explaining key ideas and trends; ·· explains to students why English, more than any other subject, is the cause of public debate and concern in the media and amongst politicians and educators. This popular and classic guide has been fully updated throughout to take account of recent research, educational changes and current events, and it now includes a chapter called ‘Why Study English?’ – showing how and why the skills taught by English are transferable to a range of careers. This immensely readable book is the ideal introduction to studying English Literature. Robert Eaglestone is professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is widely published and has advised a range of government bodies and exam boards. In 2014, he won a HEA National Teaching Fellowship.

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Doing English A Guide for Literature Students (Fourth Edition) Robert Eaglestone

Fourth edition published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Robert Eaglestone The right of Robert Eaglestone to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or ­hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Routledge 1999 Third edition published by Routledge 2009 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Eaglestone, Robert, 1968- author. Title: Doing English: a guide for literature students / Robert Eaglestone. Description: Fourth edition. | Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, [2017] Identifiers: LCCN 2017002785 (print) | LCCN 2017014945 (ebook) | ISBN 9781315175690 (Master) | ISBN 9781351707527 (ePub) | ISBN 9781351707534 (pdf) | ISBN 9781351707510 (Mobi/Kindle) | ISBN 9781138039612 (hardback: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138039674 (pbk.: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315175690 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: English literature–Study and teaching (Higher)–Great Britain. | English literature–History and criticism–Theory, etc. | English literature–Outlines, syllabi, etc. Classification: LCC PR51.G7 (ebook) | LCC PR51.G7 E25 2017 (print) | DDC 820.71/241–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017002785 ISBN: 978-1-138-03961-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-03967-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-17569-0 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Dedicated to my children, Alex and Isabella

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Contents

List of illustrations xi Acknowledgementsxiii A note for students xv A note for teachers and academics xvii Part I How we read  1 Studying English Who is this book for?  3 1: Reading is active  5 2: English is a discipline  6 3: English is controversial  7 4: English is constantly changing  7 How to use this book  8 Summary 9   2  Where did English come from? Beginning the conversation  12 Before English: The nineteenth century  12 How modern English began  19

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Contents

The ‘Leavis method’  22 Summary 23   3  Studying English today Changing world, changing English  25 Using theory  29 English today  31 Summary 33

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  4  The discipline of English 35 What is a discipline, anyway?  35 Problems in English and ‘disciplinary consciousness’  39 Conclusion 45 Summary 46  5 Critical attitudes Into the text or out from the text? 47 Intrinsic attitudes: Into the text  48 Extrinsic attitudes: Out of the text  50 Contrasting these two attitudes  52 Summary 53

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Part II What we read   6  Literature, value and the canon Can literature be defined?  57 What is literary value?  59 What is the canon?  60 How does the canon affect you?  64 Canons tomorrow?  66 Summary 68

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 7 Castle Shakespeare 69 Shakespeare the Star: The traditionalists’ argument  72 Shakespeare the Black Hole: The cultural materialists’ argument 74 Is Shakespeare ‘simply the best’?  75 Does Shakespeare teach values?  78 viii

Contents

Does Shakespeare have a universal appeal?  81 The effects of this debate on studying Shakespeare  81 Traditionalists and iconoclasts in other debates  82 Conclusion   84 Summary 85 Part III Reading, writing and meaning   8  The author is dead? 89 How important is the author in deciding what a work of literature means?  89 For authorial intention: The authority of the author  90 1. Meaning  91 2. Biographical evidence  92 3. Authorial presence  92 4. Simple evaluation  92 Against authorial intention: The death of the author  92 1. Meaning: Is literature a code?  93 2. Biographical evidence  93 3. Authorial presence  95 4. Simple evaluation  96 So why has the author always seemed so important?  97 Consequences of the death of the author  98 Summary 100   9  Metaphors and figures of speech 101 Figures of speech everywhere  101 Metaphors in literature  103 Metaphors in everyday speech  104 Basic conceptual metaphors  105 What metaphors mean and how they shape the world  106 Summary 109 10  Narrative and closure How are narratives made?  111 Narrators 114 Closure 115 Summary 118

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Contents

11  Creative writing and critical rewriting What is creative writing?  119 Nuts and bolts and assessment  123 Creative English?  125 Summary 125

119

Part IV English and you 12  English, politics and identity English and the polis 129 Critical attitudes and politics  131 The extrinsic attitude: Literature as politics?  131 The intrinsic attitude: Literature versus politics?  132 Where does your communal identity come from?  133 English as cultural heritage  135 Why has English been a political battleground?  138 Summary 139

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13  Why study English? What’s the use of ‘use’?  142 The values of English  143 ‘My degree taught me skills?’  145 Conclusion 148 Summary 149

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Conclusion: The importance of English

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Further reading 157 Index171

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Illustrations

Figures   3.1  The older consensus

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  3.2  Different ways of interpreting

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  3.3  Studying English today

31

  8.1  The traditional approach

91

  8.2  After the death of the author

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Table   5.1  Intrinsic and extrinsic critical attitudes

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Acknowledgements

I’ve got a long list of people to thank for this book, but mostly, I am g­ rateful to the students I have taught in English courses for showing me how to study English. I especially want to thank Jonathan Beecher Field from Clemson University, South Carolina; some of the words here are his. I discussed in detail with him many of the ideas in this book. Lots of people have read drafts and proposals and made useful comments: Carol Atherton, Pamela Bickley, Barbara Bleiman, Mark Currie, Marcello Giovanelli, Naomi Harbidge, Tim Kay, Ben Knights, Caroline Mills, Jenny Stevens and Gary Snapper, Jennifer Neville, Adam Roberts and Sara Salih. I profited particularly from conversations about this book with Ewan Fernie, Judith Hawley, Douglas (‘Are you ready for some criticism?’) Cowie, and with Kristen Kreider and Sophie Robinson. I’d also like to thank the following for their support: Debbie Wheeler, Sarah-Jane Duval-Hall, Lisa Dacunha and Laura Shoulder. I am extremely grateful to Polly Dodson for her editorial commitment and enthusiasm, to Ruth Hilsdon, Zoe Meyer and Deepti Agarwal. Thanks also go to her predecessors, Talia Rodgers and, especially, to Liz Thompson: Liz edited the first edition of this book with amazing understanding, passion and attention, above and beyond the call of duty. Errors are, of course, mine. Thanks to the staff at the British Library (especially in Humanities 2) for being so unfailingly helpful. Reading and writing books is also a social process, so thanks to these people for their help and friendship: Eva Aldea, Shahidha Bari, Oli Belas,

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A cknowledgements

Matthew Broadbent, Pie and Mel Corbett, Penny Crawford, Holly Crocker, Tommy Crocker, Sarah Dimmerlow, Mogs Eaglestone, William Eaglestone, Sarah Elgie, Finn Fordham, Malcolm Geere, Jane Geere, Simon Glendinning, Geraldine Glennon, Sophie Goldsworthy, Nicole Gyulay, Martin Haliwell, Adrian Harvey, Nick Hoare, the Kelleys, Barry and Carol Langford, the Livseys, Steve Lock, Sean Matthews, Gail Marshall, Martin McQuillan, Ankhi Mukhergee, Alex Murray, Hilary Sanders, Benjamin Poore, Danielle Sands, Helen Smith, Gavin Stewart, Dan Stone, Richard Tennant, Sarah Tennant, Julian Thomas and Pam Thurschwell, with a very special thanks to Poppy Corbett.

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A note for students

Why English? You’ll have your own reasons: perhaps you’ve always loved reading, thinking and talking about your favourite books and writers; perhaps you’re attracted to the range and infinite variety of the subject. You’ll want to find your study stimulating and satisfying, and you’ll want to get good marks. This book can help, because if you know why a subject is the way it is, if you have a sense of the bigger picture, a subject is easier to understand and more enjoyable, and you become better at it. Doing English is about the ‘why’. The book seeks to orient you in English by explaining some basic concepts, by showing why they are important and by giving you the background knowledge to explore new ideas. It discusses the often unspoken links between courses you take and their relevance to wider debates about literature. And if you want to know what practical skills you’re learning from studying English, that’s here too. Doing English does this by looking ‘behind the scenes’ of the subject. The book will give you a sense of the arguments and developments that took place ‘backstage’ and are still going on, and how these shape your course of study. This backstage view will lead to different kinds of conversations and debates about literature and how it is understood. This might mean coming to appreciate multiple views of the same novel or poem or seeing why you might have to do a course on Shakespeare for your English degree. This, too, will offer you some insight into why English academics teach and research what they do.

xv

A note for students

Informed and engaged discussions of literature and ideas continue beyond school and university, and, of course, with people who did not choose to study English. The ability to discuss and debate words and ideas is not only important and pleasurable in its own right, but it’s also crucial to the world of work now and in the future. More, while it is not a requirement for ­citizenship, this ability is necessary for an informed citizenship. The skills one learns in English are crucial for the future of democracy. So, when your science student friends ask what you can do with a BA in English (and they will), you can not only point out the crucial skills you are learning (and perform them through argument!) but also show that you are playing a vital role for our future. Overall, I hope that this book will enrich your growth as a student of literature, helping you to get higher marks and, more significantly, perhaps, to develop a deeper understanding and enjoyment of the work that you do.

xvi

A note for teachers and academics

This book was written to be of direct use to your teaching; indeed, Doing English had its origins in my experience of teaching. I found that students reading literature, criticism and especially reading theory, and sometimes struggling, demanded, quite rightly, to know why they were reading this or that particular text. I discovered (rather obviously, in retrospect) that when I explained why they were studying this text or topic, why this cluster of ideas was important, they found their study significantly easier and more enjoyable and they did better. In exploring the ‘why’, in trying to look backstage, Doing English openly addresses an awkward but well-recognised aspect of the subject. In some ways, English seems outside what we think of as education. The study of literature is about an array of things that are deeply significant but hard to pin down or test: personal response and experience, passion, interest, exploration, otherness, community, delight. In other ways, of course, as one of the most popular and often required academic subjects, it is very much within education. There is a tension between the concrete objectives of obtaining certificates, degrees, skills and qualifications, on the one hand, and, on the other, a more intangible but no less real sense of personal and communal betterment. In English, this very real tension seems at its most obvious. ‘Will this be in the exam?’ can irritate the teacher, while the ambiguities of literary meaning and a lack of clear authoritative answers can irritate the student. However, this book seeks to go beyond this tension by explaining to students why English is taught and studied the way it is; its focus is on what

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A note for teachers and academics

some educationalists call metacognition. Roughly, this means knowing what you are doing and why; knowing this not only makes you better at doing it, it makes it more rewarding and pleasurable too. Understanding the wider context helps focus the more specific learning that is taking place. Metacognition is crucial for making students informed, independent learners who can make connections and develop interests for themselves in their education. Of course, this sort of overview of English is both challenging and problematic. There is little general consensus about the aims, approaches, purposes or even material to be studied; English is characterised by dissensus, in fact. More, English is a fissiparous and quickly moving academic field (some of our colleagues in other disciplines find this ‘faddish’, but I think it might equally well be seen as ‘responsive’ or even ‘responsible’). Students often take a range of courses and find it hard make links between, say, ‘Renaissance poetry’ and ‘Contemporary fiction’. But this book aims to take up precisely this challenge, in an introductory and not too programmatic way. This is why the book spends a little time explaining how the origins of the discipline still shape its confusing and often contradictory present: how and why it became what it is now and what this actually means for students of English (Chapters 2 and 3). The book then introduces the idea of an openended and fluid ‘disciplinary consciousness’, describes how this is learned as a process (Chapter 4) and then outlines some general critical attitudes (roughly, formalism and historicism, in Chapter 5). Central to the book is the idea of ‘thinking as a critic’. Just as a mathematician (obviously) doesn’t learn all the (infinite) answers to all the (infinite) mathematical problems but ways of thinking about and solving them, and just as a geographer learns to think about space and locations in certain specific ways, so English teaches students to think ‘as’ critics. This may once have been, but is no longer, a sort of monolithic, fixed identity; it is no longer. Rather, it is a mobile, developing sense of a range of questions and ideas about the literary, widely defined, and, again, is characterised by dissensus. Learning to ‘think as a critic’ is a process, which is why the second part of the book introduces long-standing debates and disagreements that have shaped the discipline and how it thinks: over value and the canon (Chapter 6), understanding Shakespeare (Chapter 7), authorial intention (Chapter 8), figural language (Chapter 9), narrative (Chapter 10) and creative writing (Chapter 11). In each case, the book explains why these are important and controversial. Arguments around these topics, often made implicitly, play a central part in English, and it’s important that students know about them and what the stakes are.

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A note for teachers and academics

The book stresses throughout how contentious English is as a subject, and Chapter 12 addresses the often stormy relationship between English, identity and politics. The final chapter focuses directly and explicitly on debates over instrumentality in English and on the skills that English can teach students for the workplace; that is, it robustly answers the Gradgrindian question ‘What use is an English degree?’ while showing why that question is itself questionable. Doing English is designed to work as a primer or as pre-course reading, so that your students enter your seminars or lectures with the confidence and knowledge that allows them to understand and contextualise what they are studying and why. But it is also designed to be read as shorter pieces that can easily be integrated into your more focused teaching. It can be applied to a variety of courses, as it uses a variety of examples from literature and culture and aims to be accessibly written. The book is short and the topics the subject of much argument. Tensions between your views and the text are inevitable but, perhaps, these may set the stage for your own interventions. Learning is process; what seems simple from higher up is often just a lower rung. The discipline of English, of course, faces some challenges, although the situation is not as bleak as some paint it. At its best, it is a subject that can form responsible, knowledgeable, thoughtful, literate, creative and highly employable individuals who retain a lifelong passion for literature and culture. This book, in introducing the subject to students and explaining why it is the way it is, seeks to play some part in this.

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part I

How We Read

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1 Studying English

·· Who is this book for? ·· What is it for? ·· How to use this book.

Who is this book for? This book is about why and how we study English. It will explain key ideas about English and the study of literature. If you are doing English literature at university or college, or for A-level, or on an IB course, this book is for you. This book aims to be a stepping-stone to higher education by introducing significant new questions and ideas about English and literature. English, the largest and most popular arts and humanities discipline, seems very different from other school or university subjects. It’s not just that reading literature is (usually but not always!) pleasurable. In English, your knowledge of literature is made through your experience of reading and isn’t simply handed down to you from authorities: you do English (it isn’t, shouldn’t be, done to you). More, knowing about literature is often a sort of knowing that can’t easily be explained: for example, knowing that a story moves you deeply is an important piece of knowledge but is hard to write about for an exam. (If this leads you to think that there might be different kinds of knowledge, you’re right, there are, although the processes of education and assessment

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HOW WE READ

sometimes make them feel all the same). English can be unpredictable because when we read, our own experiences and imaginations – our own selves and the communities that shaped us – are inevitably bought into the class or seminar. Reading, thinking, feeling and learning about literature is bound up very closely with how we live, how we are with others, how we talk, feel, question and have opinions, and, sometimes, how we decide between right and wrong. It’s a strange subject, then, at the same time both inside the systems of education (you have to take exams) and outside them (it’s about who and how you are, about things that can’t be assessed by a test). These are some of the reasons that students are drawn to English (and, perhaps, that some don’t like it). This book aims to explain why English is the way it is and what this means. In addition to this, as I’ll show later in the book and centrally in Chapter 13, English teaches vital skills and broadens capacities for life and for work. Perhaps rather surprisingly, there isn’t a clear answer to the question ‘What is English?’ To say that it is ‘the study of literature’, ‘analysing writing’ or simply reading novels, poems and plays and thinking and writing about them doesn’t really answer the question. What does ‘learning about literature’ or ‘doing English’ actually mean? What ideas does it involve? Why do it one way rather than another? Why do it at all? People usually begin ‘studying English’ without thinking about what they are doing in the first place and, perhaps more importantly, why they are doing it. And because it’s both inside and outside the normal processes of education, the answers to these questions are all the more complex. Teachers of English at all levels in education have had long and tortuous discussions and arguments (and even ‘culture wars’) over these questions – over what the subject is and how to study it – but these have rarely been explained to you, the person who is actually doing English. But the answers to these questions are important because they shape what you actually do; your curriculum, essays, projects and exams; what literature you read; and even how you read it. Some people think these ideas are too complex for students beginning to study the subject: I disagree. I think lots of questions about English (such as ‘is there a right answer?’ or ‘why are we doing this?’ or ‘why is it called English?’) crop up right at the start. The answers to these questions shape what you do, whether you know about them or not. Doing English aims to explain these ideas and show how they influence you as well as being interesting in their own right. Knowing about these ideas will also make you better at doing English. John Hattie, an expert in education, undertook a huge ‘study of studies’, covering some 80 million (!) students over many years. He argues that what he called ‘metacognition’ – he means, roughly, ‘knowing what you are doing’ – is crucial to improve a student’s work. This makes sense: I believe that if

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Studying English

you know why you are studying something, the subject becomes easier to understand and you become better at it. In English, this means that what helps you to do your best is not just knowing the texts but knowing what you are doing with them and why. This book is shaped by four core ideas about English that I explain through the first four chapters. 1: Reading is active First and most importantly is the idea that reading is active process, something you do. It can seem passive – you often read sitting or lying down, after all – but it isn’t a natural process, it doesn’t just happen. Reading is a dynamic act of interpretation. And knowledge is made through the experience of reading and can’t simply be ‘poured into you’, as if it were water and you were a bucket. This means that ‘reading’ and ‘interpreting’ mean almost the same thing, and you’ll see I use the words almost as synonyms in this book. When you interpret, it means that you find some things important and not others or that you focus on some ideas and questions and so disregard others. You bring your ideas, your tendencies and preferences – yourself – to a reading a book, hearing a poem, seeing a play, watching TV or a film or looking at social media on a screen: your interpretation is shaped by a number of presuppositions. These are the ‘taken for granted’ ideas, tendencies and preferences you carry with you and, like glasses that you can’t take off, you always read ‘through’ them. On a surface level, your interpretation will be affected by the context in which you read and the expectations you have of the text. For example, if you read a novel about women in the Victorian period for a history project, you’ll think about it in one way (perhaps, to find out facts about how women were treated or represented); if you read the same novel for fun, you’ll read it in another way (perhaps, to find out what happens next). At a deeper level, you bring with you presuppositions about yourself, other people and the world, presuppositions you may take so much for granted that you might not even realise you have them. At this deep level, everyone has different presuppositions because – simply – people are different, to a greater or lesser degree, and have been shaped by different experiences. People from different backgrounds, sexes, sexualities, religions, classes, ages and so on will be struck by different things in any text. In addition, everything you have read and experienced previously affects how you interpret now. This idea is sometimes summed up by saying that everyone is ‘located’ or ‘placed’ in the world. Some argue that your interpretations will

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HOW WE READ

always be constrained by these presuppositions; others think that you can escape them (what do you think about this?). Whichever is the case, you can think about and analyse them. More, you can learn about other presuppositions, other ways of interpreting texts. All this means that, in the study of literature, no interpretation is neutral or objective; rather, it has to be argued for and explained. And it means that how we read is as important as what we read, because our presuppositions, to a great degree, shape the meanings we take from literature. Part of the aim of this book is to explore the impact of this rather obvious but often forgotten idea that texts are interpreted. This book also aims to make us think about our presuppositions and how they shape how we read. It is because of the importance of interpretation that I have used the word text regularly throughout this book. Apart from being shorter to write than ‘novel, poem or play’, it emphasises that reading is an act of interpretation – texts are things that are interpreted. The word text also makes it clear that it’s not only literature that is interpreted; so are people’s actions, television, posts on social media and music, for example. News is interpreted both when it is watched, heard or read and when it is put together by journalists or others (and part of interpretation is judging whether an item is news, fake news or propaganda or lies, for example). All these are ‘texts’. 2: English is a discipline Something important stemming from this first point: while English can seem as if it is just you reading, it is a subject or, more formally, a discipline. All educational disciplines, and perhaps all forms of knowledge, grew from very basic human activities. Chemistry grew from cooking and making clothes (dyes and so on). Geometry means ‘measuring the earth’, vital for early faming societies. Creative writing and criticism both come from listening to stories and poems or watching dramas – interpreting texts – and then asking questions and talking about them, and writing about them in different ways. More, every discipline is made up of the questions it asks of the material it has chosen as its subject: originally practical questions (what to mix together to make red dye?), then, slowly, more abstract questions (how does the process of dyeing actually work? How do the different substances involved react to each other and change?). Similarly, acts of interpretation lead pretty quickly to quite complicated questions, ideas and debates (including debating what actually might count as literature and what might count as a valid interpretation). These sorts of ideas have come, through complicated

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Studying English

histories, to form the discipline of English and shape what we do in it today. I look at those histories in Chapters 2 and 3 because, while these ideas are often ‘below the surface’ and are rarely discussed with students, they still shape how English is taught and learned. It can be a bit of shock to think of reading and talking about books, and so about ourselves and others, as a discipline. But English is a discipline that has spent a long time thinking about its own nature as a discipline, precisely because it can look as if it is not one. As a discipline, English has all sorts of questions and ideas that it brings to the study of literature; this book explores some of these. And I’ll argue in Chapter 4 – and in the rest of this book – that studying English involves coming to know about these questions and ideas and how they might change our understanding of texts. 3: English is controversial People who practice the discipline of history are historians, and those who study biology are biologists; however, for reasons that the next two chapters will make clear, even the name for people who study English is more controversial (although I liked the idea some year 12s came up with when I discussed this with them: ‘Englishers’). Indeed, the third idea that shapes this book is that while English is very popular, it is also very controversial, often because of its subject matter but also because, as a discipline, it is woven into deep moral and political visions about who we are, how we should live and how we see the world and others. People with very different views on politics, morals, religion, education and history (and everything else!) have clashed time and time again over the subject of English, and these clashes have shaped the discipline, and how we read, in particular ways. This is one reason why, for example, the A-level curriculum keeps being changed. To think about English and how we look at literature is to see a reflection of these clashes, of ourselves and of our cultures. This idea is developed throughout the book, and, again, part of the reason for this book is to explain why this subject is so contentious. 4: English is constantly changing Finally, this book tries to show that English, and how we see literature, are constantly changing. All disciplines change over time; chemistry is very different now from how it was 300, 100 or even 50 years ago. More, disciplines are born, grow and die out over time. English is a relatively new

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subject; its modern form is only just over three or four generations old. It is also one of the most quickly evolving and developing subjects; indeed, the study of literature has transformed radically in the last 30 years or so. One result of this has been that there can sometimes be a large gap – even a ­disconnection – between the way you study English at university and the way you study it for A-level. This gap exists because there has been a huge influx of new ideas into the discipline of English – ideas about, for example, feminism and gender, sexuality, the mind and the body, politics, race, globalisation, the environment and the contemporary world, the use of digital technology and other art forms, as well as ideas drawn from all sorts of other disciplines. These new ways of thinking about literature have stimulated new forms of studying literature and even helped rediscover books, trends and authors that were previously passed over or ignored. These newer ideas, often summed up as ‘literary theory’, created this gap. You may come across some of these ideas at A-level, and, if you choose to do English at university, you definitely will. Studying English today means having a sense of what these ideas are and, crucially, why they have arisen. Because of these new ideas, English as a subject has become much more wide-ranging and challenging, and these changes have affected all of us who study or teach English. This book’s aim is not to explain in great detail all the new ideas that make up ‘literary theory’ but to explain why they are studied. How to use this book This book is for anyone who wants to know why they are studying English. It aims: ·· to orient you, by explaining what you are doing and why when you are studying English; • to equip you, by explaining basic key ideas; ·· to encourage you to explore newer ways of studying English. Often courses, exams and assessment seem to be more concerned with facts than with ideas: people focus on dates, for example, and not why things happen. But this is a book about ideas and should be read in that light. For example, although I mention various people throughout the book, what is important about them is not so much their names or dates but the ideas they have had and passed on to others.

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The book is in four parts: ·· • • ··

How we read (Chapters 1–5) What we read (Chapters 5–7) Reading, writing and meaning (Chapters 8–11) English and you (Chapters 12–13)

Each part contains chapters that explore in detail one idea that is central for English today. The book finishes with a ‘Further reading’ section, which is broken down by chapter and shows you where the ideas covered in each chapter came from and so where you can read about them in more detail. Each chapter starts with a list of questions and finishes with a summary highlighting the main ideas covered. A couple of chapters also have diagrams which help clarify important ideas. The book is designed to be read in chapter order and gets more complex as it progresses. Since each chapter builds on the preceding one, you may prefer to read one chapter at a sitting and allow the ideas it raises to sink in before you start reading the next one. Or you may not. Having outlined how the book works and what it’s for, I will now turn to the first question. Where did the subject of English come from? Summary ·· This book is an introduction to ideas about English and literature. ·· Reading is an active process: it is an act of interpretation. ·· All interpretations have presuppositions. We can explore and analyse our presuppositions. ·· English is a discipline shaped by certain ideas and by its history. ·· English is controversial because both literature and how we read literature are involved with debates about who we are, how we should live and how we see the world. ·· Like any discipline, English is constantly changing. ·· If you know why you are doing something, you are better at doing it. This book seeks to explain why we study English in the ways we do.

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2 Where did English come from?

·· What are disciplines? ·· How did English develop? ·· How do those ideas still shape English today?

Subjects seem taken for granted on school timetables or in the names of university departments. But they didn’t just appear; they were slowly constructed over time and shaped by particular arguments and debates. Moreover, disciplines are not just ways of studying things that already exist; they shape what they study as much as what they study shapes them. How you look changes what you see; what you see changes how you look. This is true of the discipline of English and what it studies – what we now call ‘literature’ (and I’ll discuss this more detail in Chapter 6). Here, I’ll look at the intellectual, artistic, cultural and social forces that created the discipline of English, because this history, although rarely discussed, is not simply ‘in the past’ but continues to shape what we do today. English is like a long conversation through time. Like any conversation, it moves over various linked themes; it has quarrels and agreements; people talk at the same time, struggle to be heard or shout louder and louder to dominate the debate; people suggest fresh ideas (‘what about this?’) or respond to earlier ones (‘can we just go back to…?’); there are newer and

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older participants; like all proper conversations, part of it concerns the point of the conversation itself (‘can we please focus on why are we discussing this?’); and now you, doing English, have joined this conversation and will change what’s said next. Like working out what was said in a long conversation, the story of the growth of English is complex; there is no single ‘eureka!’ moment, and all the many participants have different versions of what happened. Its history means that English is a family of linked, evolving concepts that don’t fit neatly together neatly at all. Beginning the conversation Although what we now call literature is as old as civilisation, the formal study of literature is really very recent; doing English as we do now would seem strange or even laughable to somebody from the early or mid-nineteenth century. People have always talked (and often written) about the stories they heard, the poems they read or plays they saw, since all literary works imply discussion and understanding: they call for interpretation. But what is important in this context is how this became a discipline, a school and university subject. Some disciplines were invented in the distant past. Scientists, for example, argue that people were doing what could be recognised as science in Egypt 2000 years ago, and that the basic principles of scientific investigation (experiment, observation and conclusion) were formulated by the English philosopher and scientist Francis Bacon (1561–1626). Philosophy, too, can claim to have started more than 2500 years ago. In comparison, English, as we recognise it today, is a very new discipline. It started to emerge in the last decades of the nineteenth century but wasn’t really established as a subject until the early decades of the twentieth century. Before the nineteenth century, there was no subject that corresponded to the discussions people had about Shakespeare or the letters they wrote to each other about the books or poetry they had read. In fact, no one had even really defined what the category of literature might contain; until relatively recently, the term included what we would call history, geography, linguistics, biography, philosophy, sociology, politics, science and much more. Before English: The nineteenth century In the early nineteenth century, the closest thing to what we know as English – and it was still pretty distant – was the study of ‘the classics’, the ancient Greek and Roman plays, poems and historical and philosophical texts from

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which society drew a great deal of inspiration. The study of these was crucial in making one an educated gentleman. (And I do mean gentleman – women generally weren’t allowed to study them. Indeed, in her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1792], the early British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft [1759–1797] argued that the right to study the classics was vital for women’s equality.) And, while novels and plays were discussed in letters, newspapers and magazines, it was taken for granted (although perhaps not by everybody) that literature in English was at best an imitation of the classics and at worst only a pleasant diversion. It certainly wasn’t worthy of study in the way that ‘the classics’ were. But this idea was to change. One of the most important academic disciplines that underlay the development of English was philology. Philology (etymologically, it means, roughly, ‘love of words’) is the study of language and the historical origin and evolution of languages. In part, it grew from the earlier traditions of biblical understanding and exegesis, and it was perhaps the dominant humanist subject in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Because of the questions it asked and its historical approach, it was sometime seen as threatening to established ideas. Philologists used a huge range of texts from the past – religious, historical, those we now call literary – to trace back the ‘family tree’ of languages to their origins. (Indeed, it’s been suggested that the origins of philology were in magic, as people believed that the more ancient the language was, the more power it had because it was closer to the language spoken by God, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. This link between ancient languages and magic is why, for example, spells in books like the Harry Potter series are in versions of Latin or sound antique). But by the eighteenth century, scholars were less interested in magic and more in using language as way of tracing back national and, for some, racial identity (uncovering our ‘cultural DNA’, we might say today). In doing this, philologists often put together exhaustively edited scholarly editions to present literary and other works in their fullest and best versions. While this was less interested in what texts meant – in what made them ‘literary’ for example – and more in how they fitted into a wider historical picture, philology helped establish the sense that works could be studied historically, that they formed part of a tradition and that this tradition was somehow connected to national or communal identities. Through the nineteenth century, literature came to be seen as an expression of ‘national character’ or identity; Shakespeare, for example, became a way of thinking about being British. At the same time, universities also taught the discipline of rhetoric, as they had for hundreds of years; rhetoric is the art of how to speak and write well

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and persuasively. People teaching rhetoric often used what we now think of as literary texts for models for good (or bad!) writing and as examples to work through. (Rhetoric also underlies the study of how we write or speak, what in the United States is called ‘composition’). Like philology, the study of rhetoric was also less interested in the meaning of texts and their literary merits and more interested in the use of language itself. Interestingly, and in contrast to the nationalism that seemed inherent in philology, studies in rhetoric stressed how English was a language amalgamated from others (from Latin, Saxon, Old German, Norse, etc.) and how different words for roughly the same things created complex shades of meaning. A third strand grew outside the schools and universities. Influenced a great deal by the poets William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and Samuel Coleridge (1772–1834), the idea grew that poems, plays and novels were not simply pieces of ‘dry’ historical evidence for tracing the development of the language, nor schoolroom sources to be drawn on for examples of how to write well; instead, literature was not only beautiful and moving but also taught about ‘how to live’ in the broadest sense, cultivating an organic way of being and living in the world. In this, it became assumed that that some writers, centrally Shakespeare, were better, more valuable and more important, precisely because they enabled this broad sense of life. These were critics especially interested in evaluating and appreciating literary works as ­literary. They were opposed by those, schooled in the rigours of philology, who judged that ‘thinking about how to live’ sounded rather too vague and broad and an excuse to spend time reading ‘pretty writing’ (‘belles lettres’) rather than being a demanding form of scholarship. An example of how these strands came together, in the middle of the nineteenth century, is in courses at colleges of the University of London. For the first professors of English, the division between what we think of as ‘English’ and ‘history’ didn’t exist, and the study of literature was as much a study of a historical period as its literature. Literature was taken to be the best way to come to know a historical period and, through that, the ‘mind of a people’. This is one reason why English is (or was) called English (and not literary studies, for example): it stemmed from the idea that by studying English, one comes to understand who the ‘English’ are. As Ted Underwood argues in his book Why Literary Periods Mattered, at this time the ‘English curriculum was explicitly designed to foster national self-consciousness (expressed practically, as mastery of English style)’. This sort of cultural nationalism remains in a legacy in the name of the subject and is also, of course, one reason the subject itself is controversial (as I’ll discuss in more detail in Chapter 12).

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But this very powerful idea – that somehow writing ‘opens up’ the inner mind of a people and a period and in doing this shapes or influences ­people – had more than just academic consequences. In Britain, it clearly helped foster a national identity, a focus point for both the nations within the state (England, Wales, Scotland and, then, the whole island of Ireland) and also disparate groups within the state. But it had more far-reaching consequences too. At roughly the same time that courses in English were starting in London and spreading across the English speaking world, this idea was being used in more dubious ways. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the British Empire was the dominant world power, and central to that empire was the colonial occupation of India. At the start of the century, the British ruled India not directly but through a company, the East India Company, which had a complex contract or ‘charter’ concerning trade and the exploitation of territory. (A fictionalised, but equally rapacious, version of the East India Company is also the villain in the Pirates of the Caribbean films). The charter was agreed by the British Parliament and renewed every 20 years. In 1813, parliament renewed the charter but made a number of changes. They increased the East India Company’s responsibility for the education of the Indian population and at the same time made it much harder for the company to support the work of Christian missionaries and preachers. Previously, the East India Company had helped to convert the Indian population, because the people in charge believed that Christian Indians would be more honest and hard-working and more supportive of the company’s colonial exploitation. They thought that studying the Bible and Christianity made the population more ‘moral’, if moral is understood in the extremely narrow and self-interested sense of ‘being in agreement with the principles of the company’. However, many people in London thought it was quite risky persuading someone to become a Christian. (Perhaps this was because converting someone involved asking her or him a lot of searching questions, which Christianity then claimed to answer; the last thing Britain and the East India Company wanted was for anybody to ask searching questions about anything, in case their regime itself came into question.) The upshot of this was that the East India Company had to devise another way of making sure that the native population would be eager to follow an ‘English way of life’, closely enough at least enough to be good company servants. The literature of England came to be seen as a mould of the English way of life, thought, taste and morals, so the idea arose that Indians could be taught to be more English by teaching them English literature. Studying English literature was seen as a way of ‘civilising’ the

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native population, which aimed, in the words of the British politician and administrator Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859), in his Minute on Indian Education of 1835, to create a ‘class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’. In 1835, this idea was made law by the English Education Act, which officially made English the medium of instruction in Indian education and required the study of English literature. So the idea of a school and academic discipline called English, which involved reading and writing about novels, plays and poems written in English, was formed in India and the Empire quite as much as in England (and shows that the histories of England and Britain are inextricably interwoven with their global, colonial and imperial histories, even down to the subjects we study in school and university). This is another reason why the subject is called English; the idea that the study of English literature was a ‘civilising force’ remained very strong and was brought back to Britain. During the nineteenth century, internal division and struggles threatened to tear the nation apart. The Napoleonic wars had exhausted the country; a huge increase in population and the continuing industrialisation of the country led both to domestic unrest and to the growth of enormous cities filled with poor workers. Those in power felt that Britain was being overrun by these ‘barbarians’ and that anarchy or revolution was just around the corner. By educating the ‘British savages’ in ‘civilised English’ values, they hoped to maintain the political and social status quo. Many thinkers and reformers did feel that education was good in its own right, of course, but the hope of preventing revolution was certainly always in the background. Latin or Greek, considered the highest forms of ‘civilisation’, were assumed to be beyond the reach of most people in Britain, whereas novels, plays and poetry written in English were not. In effect, the study of English literature was brought back to Britain to ‘re-civilise the native savages’. The schools inspector, poet and thinker Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) is one of the most famous of these. In his best-known book, Culture and Anarchy (1869), he wrote that culture – and he means mainly literary culture – would make ‘all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light’. We might see this as a little simplistic, but it is a measure of the great hopes that were pinned on the study of literature. As the end of the nineteenth century approached, and despite a few courses in London and Scottish universities in English, English as a discipline didn’t exist broadly in universities or in any formal, extended way. However, there was a huge public interest in literature in English, stemming, in part, from that sense that literature told us something important

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Where did English come from?

about how to be. This was demonstrated by the numbers of people ­attending courses on English literature all over the county at newly formed literary societies (slightly more formal versions of our book groups) and in the success of the University Extension movement. As Alexandra Lawrie explains, in the 1870s, many universities set up ‘extra-mural’ (literally, ‘outside the walls’) courses that ‘aimed to attract members of the working- and lowermiddle class who were eager for self-improvement and willing to attend lectures and classes on a part-time basis in their local area’. In this movement, as Ben Knights suggests, ‘new forms of dialogue’ were developed with ‘a new kind of student’. Some of the people involved in this have been forgotten, but they were vital in the conversation that helped develop the discipline of English. One leading figure was John Churton Collins (1848– 1908). His polemical book The Study of English Literature (1891) insisted that education, especially university education, had ‘new duties and new responsibilities’ to instruct people of all classes, not just the well off. More, literature and the interpretation of literature, he claimed, could be taught to students of any background. For Collins, studying literature was a ‘moral and aesthetic education’ and had a positive and healthy influence on ‘taste’, ‘tone’, ‘sentiment’, ‘opinion’ and ‘character’. He campaigned for Oxford and Cambridge to take up the subject, and he designed syllabi. Another voice in this was Richard Moulton (1849–1924), who ended up as a professor of Literary Theory and Interpretation at the University of Chicago. A dedicated teacher and scholar, he developed the idea of analysing a literary text meticulously in all its aspects: the origins of what we call today practical criticism or close reading (as I’ll show, this idea was taken up again in the 1920s by the influential critic I. A. Richards). In contrast were those, like Henry Nettleship (1839–1930), who thought that the study of English literature was of little worth, suitable only as a pastime for lesser minds. For such people, only the historical study of the development of the English language was rigorous enough to count as a subject in its own right. And, although Collins’s campaign to establish English as a subject at Oxford and Cambridge was successful, it was the more philological, ‘English as the study of language’ point of view that dominated the conversation and triumphed: Oxford’s first English degree course in 1893 involved studying German, Old English and the history of the language. Poetry was a source of examples, and novels were not worthy of study. Interestingly enough, most of the students were women, which again fulfilled the sexist idea that English was for those ‘less able’ to cope with the great works of classical civilisation.

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The origins of English, then, were made up of many conflicting forces, each offering different reasons for the study of literature and different ways to do it. Some argued that English was simply a ‘weaker’ classics; for others, it had to be a rigorous study of the history of language and its development. For some, it had to be a training in clear and effective communication; for others, it was a view into a national soul; and still others thought it was a vision of what was the best for human life. It’s not surprising, then, that the early history of English, as the subject coalesced as a school and university subject, was made up by different factions attacking each other in wars of words over many, many years. But in this pre-history, this early part of the conversation, some powerful ideas about the study of English emerged that are still with us. First, and most importantly, the study of literature is thought to be interwoven in a significant way with personal and communal identity, with values, and a powerful shaping force on a student; in turn, this is involved with wider political and social forces. Because of this, some have seen this as empowering, while others have seen it as a form of brainwashing (although, as the historian of English Gerald Graff wryly remarks, if the study of literature is ‘an instrument of…social control’ it has been a ‘singularly inefficient one’). Actually, like most things in education, English can be both indoctrination and liberation. Gauri Viswanathan, for example, argues that in India, while the teaching of English was part of colonial strategy, it also offered social and cultural advancement; as this was denied the Indian population, education became a site of conflict. In addition, a literary education offered intellectual and artistic resources for opposing the British: Viswanathan suggests, for example, that writers like the Bengali novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838–1894) ‘schooled in the best Western literary establishments in Bengal, turned their attention to reviving myths and tales of the past to stir up longings in the people for the return of a golden age’ and so to question and reject British rule. In the United Kingdom, too, people found both progressive and conservative resources in literature. Second, this early history also gave us the idea that English was involved in understanding and developing ideas and feelings and could be taught through dialogue and debate rather than simply passed down from authorities – that knowledge could be made by reading and discussion. A third idea it presents is that literature can or ought to be studied in historical periods – still a very powerful idea. These controversies were evident in the name that these different practitioners of English gave themselves: some considered themselves philologists, some editors, some linguists, some rhetoricians, some literary historians, some literary critics, some simply writers.

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However, two events were to make one of these activities – criticism – the most significant and would introduce what we now recognise as English. The first of these was a government report; the second, major changes that were made to the English degree course at Cambridge University. How modern English began In 1919, just after the end of the First World War, the government commissioned a report with the aim of studying and suggesting improvements for the teaching of English in England. The report was named after the poet Sir Henry Newbolt (1862–1938), who chaired it, and when it concluded in 1921, it effectively gave government backing to English as a subject. It stated that ‘literature is not just a subject for academic study, but one of the chief temples of the Human spirit, in which all should worship’. In an unknowing imitation of the way English had developed in India, according to the report, a teacher of literature was no longer just a teacher like any other but rather ‘a missionary’. Indeed, as this rhetoric shows, the report thought that the study of literature for its own sake was practically a religious duty and literature itself almost a religion. Just as the teaching of English in India had replaced the government backing for Christian missionaries, so the discipline of English was, in part, seen as a substitute for the values and ideals that used to be taught through religion in Britain. Recognising the contribution of the University Extension movement, the Newbolt Report was a victory over those who wanted the subject to remain the study of the history of the language and increased the speed at which English as a discipline grew. It was vital in making this new form of English acceptable and laid the groundwork for the subject we recognise today. At about the same time, a group of lecturers at Cambridge University introduced radical innovations in their university’s (mainly philological) English degree course. This group, which included the now famous critics E. M. W. Tillyard (1889–1962) and I. A. Richards (1893–1979), wanted to create a subject that would involve the study of literature in English in its own right, not just as a source of examples of how English was used in Shakespeare’s time, say, or as pale imitations of ancient Greek and Roman works. In this, they were supported (although often without recognising it) by the leading and popular critic and poet, and professor of English at Cambridge, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (usually known simply as ‘Q’), who found philology restrictive. The intellectual inheritors of Arnold and Collins, these critics believed that the study of literature would restore a sense of humanity to

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the world in the face of the rampant growth of technology and the ‘machine age’. The need for this, they claimed, was being graphically demonstrated by the First World War. The programme and teaching methods were to become hugely significant. These critics and academics were influenced by T. S. Eliot (1888–1965). Although Eliot is now thought of principally as a poet (he won the Nobel Prize in 1948), his literary criticism was very widely read and, indeed, E. M. W. Tillyard described it as ‘revolutionary’. Eliot’s essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) was immensely significant, although Eliot later tried to play it down its role. (I’ll discuss this essay again in Chapter 6). The American critic Louis Menand writes that in this essay, Eliot basically asks, What does a poet need to know? And the answer is: Poetry. The corollary to this is that the best way to understand poems is by their relation to other poems. This is the premise without which the enterprise of academic literary criticism would be unable to function. Works of literature are best appreciated in relation to other works of literature. This idea led to the (scientific-sounding) argument that (Menand again) ‘there is such a thing a specifically literary language, and that literary criticism provides an analytical tool box for examining it’. Exploring these ideas, I. A. Richards, echoing what Richard Mouton had articulated, began what he called practical criticism, presenting a poem to a class without the name of the author, the date or any other information and then letting the class respond and judge the poem as it stood by itself as an artwork, implicitly in relation to other artworks and not guarded by the ‘brand’ of its author, its context or its history. The critic William Empson (1906–1984) refined this approach in his books Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) and The Structure of Complex Words (1951) (a book that is much more interesting than it sounds). There’s a lovely account of this methodology of ‘practical criticism’ or ‘close reading’ in Stoner (1965) by John Williams (1922–1994). William Stoner is studying agriculture but taking an English course in his first year. In one class, they read a famous Shakespeare sonnet, seventy-third, which begins That time of year thou may’st in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

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In a situation some will recognise, the teacher is irritably (and rather unfairly) going around the class asking the silent students what the sonnet means. Stoner is put on the spot: what does it mean? But under pressure, something dawns on him. He begins by saying ‘it means’, as if he is going to give a regular answer (it means this or that), but then, slowly and rather amazed, he repeats ‘it means’: he has understood, in some very deep way, not simply what the sonnet might mean but, in a sudden moment, how poetry itself has meaning, and then unfolds the poem. This rather moving scene (moving, at least, for teachers and perhaps students of literature) embodies some important aspects of ‘close reading’. Stoner and his teacher are not interested in the historical context of the sonnet nor in Shakespeare’s life; they are not interested in the general questions of language; they are focused solely on the ‘words on the page’ (a phrase that became a slogan) and what those words mean. We still call this focused form of reading ‘critical appreciation’, ‘close reading’, ‘critical analysis’ or, sometimes, as ‘unseens’. This sort of criticism looked freer and more exciting than philology and more open than historical criticism. It allowed an interest in contemporary literature, which could be read just as ‘closely’ as anything older, and it meant that the act of interpretation was itself something like a shared creative act. This form of criticism, too, had the (often unacknowledged) merit of being easier to teach: it didn’t require a huge library with volumes explaining the historical background of a poet’s work, or an archive or original sources. Perhaps the most important figure for the ‘new English’ was the Cambridge literary critic F. R. Leavis (1895–1978). He and his wife, Q. D. Leavis (1906– 1981), did more to catch the mood of these changes and to shape what we think of as the discipline of English than anybody else. Both were early graduates of the new English degree course at Cambridge University and shared a number of very deeply held opinions about the state of modern culture and the role of English. Like the founders of the Cambridge English degree, the Leavises believed that the world was deteriorating: technology and industry were ruining humanity and human values, religion was dying, communities were falling apart. They felt that the modern world turned vital things and deep feelings into crass, coarse and trite popular clichés. In a number of very influential studies, such as Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (1933), they argued that only literature, and the rigorous study of literature, could remind us of our human values and of what was truly important. Works by F. R. Leavis, like New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), Revaluation (1936) on English poetry and The Great Tradition (1948) on the novel, were perhaps

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the most significant influence on how English literature was understood and, as Simon During argues, realised ‘criticism’s potential’ most fully. The Leavises, always outsiders even at Cambridge, committed themselves, with quite astonishing vigour and dedication, to establishing the study of English in a way that reflected their ideas. They became the leading figures in a prominent group of people who shared their opinions and who published a monthly journal, Scrutiny, which lasted from 1932 to 1953. Perhaps most importantly, they were not just enthusiastic teachers but also teachers of teachers: they passed their ideas down to younger generations, who became schoolteachers, examiners, journalists and so on. Many English teachers could trace a ‘family tree’ of teachers back to the Leavises or those directly influenced by them. The ‘Leavis method’ One of the Leavises’ key achievements was to foster a particular approach to the study of literature and to demonstrate their method in their works of criticism. The key ideas of the Leavises and those they influenced (‘Leavisites’), although never actually codified, can be roughly summarised as follows: ·· The study of literature has a ‘civilising mission’ to ‘humanise’ people and provide values that, in the modern world, can’t be obtained elsewhere. • A text can and should be studied and judged. This judgement or evaluation is supposed to be objective and authoritative and this was the aim of criticism for the Leavises. This means that your personal ‘gut’ response doesn’t really count. You might say ‘the play is flawed because…’ or ‘this character is engaging because ...’ rather than writing ‘I don’t like this’ or ‘I like this character’. Writing in the third person (‘he/she/the reader’) rather than the first (‘I’) is assumed to be more objective. • At the same time, the reader must demonstrate sensibility or an individual response to the text that happens ‘naturally’ when a literary text is read. This is the result in part of the ‘humanising’ mission, but it relies on a belief that every person must have something in herself or himself that is capable of being moved by reading literature and the thought that English as a subject can draw out and improve this ‘sensibility’. • Central to literature is the idea of ‘life’: this powerful idea was never defined (indeed, for the Leavises to define it was to delimit it) but could be found in the most rewarding literature.

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• Practical criticism or ‘close reading’ is the most effective method for studying literature, involving the intense scrutiny of a piece of prose or poetry, concentrating on the words on the page. • English was best taught as a sort of dialogue between critics and between teacher and students. In discussing works, the conversation might go ‘This is so, is it not?’ with a response that countered, ‘Yes, but…’ – which outlined differences, uncertainties and, so, further questions. • There is a ‘canon’ or authoritative list of great literary works that everyone with sensibility should study and admire. Authors like Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, George Eliot and Henry James would be included in the canon. ·· A literary text is free from history and time and has intrinsic artistic worth. The value is in the text and to do with the artistry of the text – we do not read because a text might tell us about, say, history or the author’s life. For the Leavises, English was critical: critical, in that to understand literature was critically important for the world; critical, in that it works through critical reading, thinking and talking. And so the dominant name for what someone who did English became a literary critic. If English is a conversation, it’s true that other voices were also heard at this period, but many of the Leavises’ ideas continued to shape the study and teaching of literature in schools, colleges and universities. You might even take some of these ideas for granted yourself, without knowing where they came from. This once-radical way of studying English became so dominant for so long that many people thought you were only doing English if you had the same aims as the Leavises and followed their approach and ideas. Challenges did come, however. The following chapters focus on these challenges, why they came about and how they have changed English as a subject. Summary ·· School and university disciplines develop over time, and, like conversations, are shaped by different voices. They shape what they study as much as what they study shapes them. ·· One ancestor of English is philology, which studies the development of languages and texts over time. Another is taught rhetoric, the art of how to speak and write well and persuasively. Another is the ‘belles lettres’ and the sense that literature teaches us about life.

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·· English also grew from the idea that literature can shape and mould people and from the ways that this idea was used, both positively and negatively, in the United Kingdom and in the British Empire. ·· During and after the First World War, many thought that the study of literature would restore a sense of humanity to the world. In 1917, a group of Cambridge academics, influenced by T. S. Eliot, changed their degree programme and set up the study of English literature in its own right. A government report – the Newbolt Report – supported this ‘new English’ and encouraged its growth nationwide. ·· Two of the earliest graduates of this Cambridge University degree, F. R. and Q. D. Leavis, were key figures in the development of English as we know it today. The Leavises’ ideas about studying literature formed much of the heart of English teaching: a ‘civilising’ mission; objective judgement; personal sensibility; practical criticism; a conversational method; the canon; a sense of intrinsic artistic worth. But these ideas were challenged.

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3 Studying English today

·· ·· ·· ··

Why did English change? What do these changes mean? What is literary theory? What does this mean for you, studying English?

In the last chapter, I argued that the development of English was like a ­conversation, and that voices of the past continued to shape the present. But that conversation didn’t finish with the Leavises, no matter how influential they were. English is constantly changing, and different and new ways of reading and studying literature have emerged – and continue to develop. These new ways of reading are often lumped together, perhaps rather clumsily, in the term literary theory. But why have these changes taken place? Changing world, changing English The world in which we live now is not the same as the world of those who shaped the subject. And if our worlds and worldviews are changing, so must our expectations of English. Crucially, many of the beliefs that the Leavises held can be seen as having hidden assumptions with which we may no longer agree. Perhaps the most important attack on the assumptions of the Leavises,

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and on the way English had been traditionally done, came from the British critic Terry Eagleton. In his extremely influential book Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), he outlined and ridiculed many of their ideas. Eagleton, a Marxist, argued that the Leavises offered an analysis of the world but were not inclined to change or revolutionise it. He felt that English was designed, subtly but firmly, to force people into a single mould, or identity, that supported a capitalist state. Although F. R. Leavis is the target of that book by Eagleton, the two have much in common: for both, literature and its study are crucially important; for both, it isn’t just the novels, poems and plays but the whole institution of literature that is at the heart of the issue; for both, all social values are all implicitly entwined with the literary; if, as I’ve suggested, life was the key term in Leavis’s critical vocabulary, so for Eagleton, it is history; and for both, these terms are vital and yet hard to pin down. In the place of Leavis’s analyses and the work of other critics and thinkers, Eagleton offered a Marxist view (although, oddly, Literary Theory has no chapter explaining or outlining Marxist criticism). Eagleton’s book was part of a much larger and more significant change, and although Eagleton wanted to replace one set of ideas with another, it is in some part to him that we owe the use of the term theory to describe the wider influx of changes to the study of literature. These changes are most clearly explained and explored by looking at the crucial issue of interpretation. In Chapter 1, I argued that understanding literature isn’t ‘natural’, doesn’t ‘just happen’, but is the result of acts of interpretation. These acts of interpretation bring with them all sorts of presuppositions and taken-for-granted ideas. English took for granted the idea that English had a civilising mission, that there was a sort of shared objectivity, neutral and disinterested, in reading. Thus, it was critical and not personal; it presumed that a reader must demonstrate sensibility, a natural response that just happens when a text is read; it looked for the intrinsic artistic worth of a literary text and was less interested in its history or politics; it maintained an idea that there is a canon of great literary works that everyone should admire. This way of approaching literature implies that we should think, read and make judgements in the same way; if everyone were the same, there would be only one valid way of reading. If we were to express this in a diagram, it might look like Figure 3.1. However, these ideas about interpretation have been profoundly challenged. The idea of the civilising mission looks more like a process of forcing people into a fixed pattern of values, ideas and opinions by making them interpret texts in the same way. More, the belief that the study of literature

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You

One way of interpreting making an interpretation

Text

Figure 3.1  The older consensus

has a civilising mission to ‘humanise’ people and provide values implies that there is a clear idea of what the ‘human being’ and ‘values’ are supposed to be (and so, clearly, what the human is not supposed to be). The idea that one could make an objective judgement through close reading seems very questionable, because every reader brings her or his own presuppositions to a text. This is not to say that we shouldn’t read closely or that we can’t question our own presuppositions but to admit that, unlike an experiment that should reproduce the same result each time it is performed, each reading by each individual produces a different result. It might be that there is no single ‘literary’ language that criticism could uncover. Working through dialogue might also look as if, rather than being inclusive, it might exclude: ‘This is so, is it not?’ encourages agreement with some modification (‘yes, but…’) rather than the contrast of a wholly different worldview (‘no, it isn’t so!’). This leads to the idea that literary judgement should attempt to be ‘objective’: your personal ‘gut’ response and views didn’t count because it was the ‘literary-ness’ of literary language to which you responded. (As I’ll suggest in Chapter 4, this led – and still leads – to all sorts of torsions for students in how literature is read, and it seems to take literature away from the individual reader). The idea of sensibility, a natural response that just happens when a text is read, seems to rely on a natural response to literature, while the very fact that English is taught seems to confirm that such a natural response doesn’t simply arise. Moreover, the idea of sensibility implies that if you are not moved by a certain work of literature, you have somehow failed. But who decides what should move us and in what way? ‘Sensibility’ starts to sound a lot like ‘agreeing with me’, The idea of intrinsic artistic worth begs the question, again, of who decided what that worth is and how it should be reckoned. The same is true of the idea of the canon of great literary works that everyone should admire: it implies that there are judgements of worth that could be neutral and disinterested.

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In its challenge to what had gone before, the work of Eagleton, and o­ thers, opened a door to many diverse new ways of reading. These new ways of reading are often grouped together under the catch-all term literary theory, although this isn’t an ideal phrase. Because of the range of these ideas and their differences, and because these approaches rarely agree with each other, literary theory might better be put in the plural: literary theories. More ‘theory’ also suggests that you have the idea and then simply ‘apply’ it, which is too simplistic a model for what happens when you read (as I’ll suggest in the next chapter). However, even if it isn’t an ideal term, theory is now understood to be central to English and the study of literature. Moving on from the idea that there was ‘one right way’ of interpreting, these new approaches to literature reflect different concerns and ideas. Important and influential ideas have entered the subject: English now draws on history, politics, women’s studies, sociology, gender studies, linguistics, philosophy and so on. And new ways of reading have also developed from within the subject of English itself. This is why some academics don’t like the term literary critic and prefer to be known as literary theorists. These changes are most clearly seen if we redraw Figure 3.1 to represent the new view of studying English (see Figure 3.2). At the heart of literary theory, then, is the realisation that every way of reading brings with it presuppositions. More than this, because everyone is different, there simply cannot be one correct way of reading. But how is literary theory useful?

Many different ways of interpreting texts

You

Figure 3.2  Different ways of interpreting

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S t u d y i n g E n g l i s h t o d ay

Using theory As well as understanding what you are doing when you are ­studying English, this way of thinking about what English is brings literature closer to you, the student. Those who shaped English at school, college and university have often not been clear about the ideas they take for granted. Sometimes, these presuppositions might run counter to your own ideas and interpretations. Trying to work out or second guess others’ unspoken and opaque ways of interpreting texts may mean that what you write in exams and papers about a work of literature might have nothing to do with what you really feel or think about it, which can be confusing and frustrating. To state this in formal terms, this marks the discrepancy between your location in the world and the older presuppositions of the discipline of English. Literary theory tries to give more weight to different presuppositions and different ways of interpreting. Once you’ve realised that interpretations are determined by worldviews and that many interpretations are valid, you can begin to explore a wider array of ideas about literature. A key to this is remembering that you aren’t limited to your own worldview; you can learn about different ways in which different people might interpret the same text. While your initial reading might be shaped by your presuppositions, literary theory offers a huge range of approaches to literature. You are free to choose one or another critical method, or to switch from one to the other, or to experiment with a selection. English becomes a question of reading certain sorts of texts in many different ways. There is no longer a right way to interpret literature, and what makes one interpretation better than another is an open question. (I discuss this in the next chapter.) What are the actual mechanics of using different approaches to literature? Any critical method works by reading with certain questions in mind. The context in which we read, our expectations and our experiences all make us concentrate on certain issues. These focus our reading and so structure our interpretations. For example, think about any of the novels, poems or plays you’ve studied. Now imagine you are asked any of these questions before you start to read: ‘What happens in the plot? Is this character likeable? How are metaphors being used to achieve a certain effect?’ Each of these three basic questions will draw your attention to different parts of the text: the plot

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question will make you look at events, the character question makes you concentrate on what that character says and does, the question on metaphor makes you look at how the language is woven together. By focusing your attention on different aspects of the text, the questions make you read in a different way and so lead you to different interpretations of the text. You might even play down metaphor or plot if you are concentrating on character. But literary theories go beyond this and offer different sorts of questions to take into a text. Feminist approaches, for example, might suggest you ask, ‘How does this text represent gender and how it works?’ Historical approaches might lead you to ask, ‘What is this text telling us about its historical period?’ The text may or may not explicitly be about these things, but you make these questions your specific focus in reading and base your interpretation on them. You can also think about the questions that shape other people’s interpretations. If you’re listening to a teacher or lecturer or reading somebody’s thoughts on a work of literature, ask yourself, ‘What unspoken questions is she or he answering?’By uncovering these questions, you will learn a lot about that particular method of interpretation and about what that person thinks is really important. A greater challenge is to ask yourself what questions haven’t been answered or haven’t even been raised. Once you’ve worked through this, you can read the text with different questions in mind and see how different critical methods give different interpretations. Each will show up things the other methods don’t. There’s no need, incidentally, to think that all these theories will agree with one another or add to a super-theory or a Grand Unifying Theory of Everything (and, in comparing English to a conversation, I’ve suggested that it never was one unified agreement anyway). In fact, the theories are more stimulating and productive when they don’t agree. Indeed, to have lots of different critical approaches to texts means that we can compare and contrast them. If English is about reading texts in different sorts of ways, it is also about examining how and why we choose these ways. English is not only about reading and enjoying literature; it’s also a question of thinking about how we read. We can show this on our diagram by adding another arrow representing a focus on interpretation itself. The name for this study of interpretation is hermeneutics, which is what I’ve called the arrow in Figure 3.3. The realisation that how we read is as important as what we read is perhaps the most important innovation in the study of literature in the last 30 years. It has changed English completely as a subject and given it a new burst of life. And it is this realisation that underlies the new ways of reading that are called, in a rather all-inclusive way, literary theory.

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Many different ways of interpreting texts

You

Text

Comparing different sorts of interpretation (‘hermeneutics’)

Figure 3.3  Studying English today

English today What does this mean for you? At most universities, then, doing involves not just reading works of literature, but also learning to interpret them in different ways. It also involves understanding how different ways of interpretation work, as this can reveal what other people consider to be significant about literature and central to their lives. This not only has the potential to create exciting new readings of texts but also to make you think about the way you see the world and your place in it. Consciously reading from different perspectives can change your ideas about the text and even about your place in the world. In this way, the subject of English can bring to light and even challenge ideas we take for granted. Because of this, many critics and educators say that this sort of questioning and reading from other perspectives is central to doing English. I think that this power to make us think about ourselves and others is one of the things that makes English such a valuable subject and is why literary theory is essential to doing English. Change rarely comes easily. The issues raised by literary theory have caused terrible arguments and divisions between students and teachers of English in schools, colleges and universities, as well as very heated

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public debates. (In the 1980s and 1990s, these were part of what was rather ­melodramatically called the culture wars.) In part, this led to the gap between English in secondary and higher education that I discussed earlier. As a discipline develops, it becomes more complex and encourages more involved debates; indeed, some argue that a discipline becomes ‘fully mature’ only when it questions the very criteria, aims and approaches with which it began. So English might begin by studying literature but then comes to ask, ‘What is literature, anyway? Why are we studying it this way rather than that way?’ These are the more reflective questions that literary theory asks. A discipline doesn’t stand still. The early years of the twenty-first century saw what many thought was an increased interest in the historical contexts for understanding works of literature (some called this a ‘turn to history’). Others, too, argued that the day of literary theory – or of certain sorts of literary theory – was over, and certainly theory, like everything else in the discipline, changes and develops. In contrast, in 2014, Vincent Leitch, editor of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, argued that there is a ‘theory renaissance’: many new forms of thinking about literature and culture, a fascinating and dazzling range of topics and ideas, all responding to the world we inhabit. Rita Felski, in The Limits of Critique (2015), worries that criticism has become too sceptical and suspicious, always concerned with how literary texts are trying to persuade or inveigle us; she is keen that we discuss our enjoyments, passions and love in reading. And Deidra Shauna Lynch’s Loving Literature: A Cultural History (2015) echoes this in tracing the history of the love of scholars for the books they study. And, of course, other strands of the discipline’s complex past can become popular again: some faculty in English have been discussing, for example, a return to philology, whereas others seek to make the discipline more like versions of rhetoric. Sometimes this can seem rather overwhelming or, because there is no one definition, threatening or unnerving. But I’m not sure it need be. Activities we undertake need not have one overriding aim; we can do a sport, for example, because we want to keep fit, because we enjoy the company or (and!) the competition and because we learn wider lessons from our dedication to practicing it. Adapting a metaphor from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, we might see English as a rope made of twisting together many strands and fibres. Wittgenstein points out that the ‘strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres’. English as a subject is made up of many of these fibres, with new ones being added all the time. It does not need one, single thread running through it (even if this were possible). Further, these theories

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and questions arise precisely from the literary material that English studies: the stories we tell ourselves, the way we represent ourselves, are supposed to be communal and are supposed to involve us in our conversations about ourselves, others and our world. These are often controversial; that the discipline exploring these is also controversial should not be a source of worry. Perhaps, more encouragingly, the whole discipline is itself like a larger version of a lively class discussion of a literary text, wherein everyone offers different interpretations. The next chapter explores in more detail what these changes and ideas mean for studying English, along with how you can learn about them. Summary ·· Studying English involves reading works of literature, learning to interpret them in different ways and understanding how these different approaches work. These new approaches have the potential to create new readings of texts and to make you think about the way you see the world and your place in it. You are, or should be, free to choose one or another method or to experiment with a selection. ·· English as a subject is constantly changing. These changes can be understood by looking at the issue of interpretation. When you read, you interpret. No interpretation is neutral or objective, because we are all influenced by a number of presuppositions. ·· Literary theory is a catch-all term for a huge range of new and different ways to read and interpret texts, reflecting the different concerns and ideas of a very wide range of people, not just an elite. All this encourages us to think about how we interpret. ·· Theory also encourages us to contrast and study different methods of interpretation in their own right. This is called hermeneutics, the study of interpretation itself. ·· How we read is as important as what we read.

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4 The discipline of English

·· ·· ·· ·· ··

How do changes in the discipline affect your study of English? What is ‘disciplinary consciousness’? Is there a right answer in English? Why is there ‘jargon’ in English? How do you learn a ‘disciplinary consciousness’?

What do the changes I have discussed in the previous chapters mean for English and how we study literature? English students are sometimes discombobulated by critics disagreeing about what a work of literature means, how good it is, how to approach it and even the point of what they are doing. Students also have questions about how the subject is done. Thinking about English as a discipline, with its many different strands, helps resolve some of these difficulties. What is a discipline, anyway? When you study maths, you don’t learn off by heart the answers to all the possible mathematical problems; that would obviously be impossible and mad. Instead, you learn methods to solve problems. Similarly, in geography, you don’t learn everything on a map; you learn to think like a geographer, to ask

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the sorts of questions a geographer might ask. In education in general, you learn not so much facts or things by rote as ways of thinking about things in the world. You learn to think as a geographer or as a mathematician. English is so controversial that, as I’ve suggested, even the name of what it is you are learning to ‘think as’ is complicated: any term (say, literary critic, student of literature, theorist, philologist) is freighted with expectations about what one should and shouldn’t do and about what English is. However, for ease, and having sketched its contentious history, I am going to use the term literary critic. So, in English, you are being taught to think as a literary critic. Learning to think as a literary critic is, like learning any discipline, learning a way of thinking, a disciplinary consciousness. Indeed, really, the whole point of this book is to introduce explicitly the disciplinary consciousness for English and for literary studies. Having this consciousness will empower you to have different and better conversations with your teachers and other students. I’m going to suggest three ways to think about this disciplinary consciousness. The first is to think about the questions a discipline asks. In Chapter 1, I suggested that all educational disciplines grew from very basic human activities and developed from more straightforward questions to more complex ones. Chemistry developed from practical questions (How best to cook this? How can we preserve this?) to much more abstract ones (How does this process occur? Why?). Literary criticism comes from reading stories and poems or watching dramas (and films, television, social media, computer games, etc.) and then thinking about them, asking questions and talking about them. The basic questions one starts off with are – like all proper questions – usually the sort that look simple but turn out not to be. As I’ll show later in Chapter 6, the question ‘what is literature?’ turns out to become more and more difficult to answer the more one thinks about it. Interestingly, while it might seem as if the world is just there and disciplines simply ‘divide it up’ into sections for study, there is considerable interplay between a discipline and what it studies: the questions one asks shape and define the area you study, as much as the areas that you study pose certain questions. ‘What is literature?’ is a case in point. As disciplines grew around it, more and more things were defined as ‘not literary’; works of history or psychology, for example, rarely count as literature today (as they used to), and, as I’ll argue in more detail in Chapter 6, even the term literature started to take on a sense of evaluation (‘Literature with a capital L’, as some put it), which meant that even some novels were thought not to be literature. So one way to think about the disciplinary consciousness of English is to wonder what questions literary critics ask. (You have come close to understanding a discipline when you know what

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sort of questions its practitioners ask and how they are answered). There isn’t a simple checklist of questions, because every work of literature is different; moreover, in English, questions move so easily from the technical and concrete (‘what is the rhyme scheme?’) to the challenging (‘more importantly, why that rhyme scheme?’) to the abstract (‘what does this really mean?’) that they are hard to pin down. (And wouldn’t it also be a very limited sort of discipline that has a simple list of questions?) However, we can see the questions we ask of literary texts (What does it mean? Why say this rather than that? Why does that make me feel like this? Why choose that form? Why is that so beautiful? What does it remind me of?) begin with the same questions we ask every day of ourselves and of the people around us, although they soon become more involved, abstract and complex. Every day we use language to express ourselves, tell stories and make patterns out of our reality. That means we judge, shape and think about language all the time, so much so that we often just forget we are doing it. Thinking as a critic both reminds us of that intimate involvement with language and, more importantly, it develops out of that involvement. This is why there is strange closeness between literary texts, language, criticism and ourselves, and that’s why English can be so risky. When we read or talk about a text, we are risking ourselves, risking revealing ourselves. That’s also why there are rarely straightforward answers: thinking as a literary critic is more about the process of asking questions and a growing awareness of how and why these questions are hard to answer. Another way to think of disciplinary consciousness is, as Ben Knights and others argue, that disciplines encourage a way of behaving or of looking and responding. A discipline is not only about its reading and assessments but also a whole range of other formal and informal ways of thinking and behaving that students learn. Sometimes these are in the classroom or lecture theatre; sometimes they are outside and serve to define students against one another. (English students, for example, are often accused of ‘reading too much into’ books, films, TV shows, status updates and so on; this means only that they are better at the very normal activity of interpreting texts, in the way that chefs are better at cooking or that engineers are better at measuring). These ways of behaving can become cultural codes or ‘scripts’ that shape the identity of the student (and the teacher) and, whether in the seminar or outside, can be quite influential. Finally, ‘disciplinary consciousness’ can be understood as a form of tradition. The idea of ‘tradition’ brings out different reactions in all sorts of people. Some are keen to embrace and inhabit traditions; others are keen to get rid of them and begin anew. However, both extremes have dangers: too

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tight an embrace means that a tradition can become simply an ossified habit, with no real meaning. In contrast, without responding to and facing the past, thinking in the present simply has nothing to go on (and risks simply making the same errors over and over again). In fact, all thinking and education takes place in the context of engaging with the past, recent or distant, whether it moves beyond a tradition or reaffirms it. Moreover, a living tradition is characterised precisely by debates about the very point and activity of that tradition. Coming to a disciplinary consciousness means precisely this: coming to terms with the traditions – in the case of English, the controversial and contrary traditions – that have shaped the discipline. Indeed, being explicit about those traditions, and upfront about their flaws and benefits, is part of what makes a discipline self-reflexive and mature. One thing that’s weird about English, and really worth stopping to think about, is that at the heart of it is the experience of engaging deeply with art, and that this experience is supposed to be both significant and pleasurable. It’s why so many people doing English are enthusiastic about their subject. And, more than this, it’s something that people do every day without being ‘literary critics’ (or whatever the name might be). But once we start to ‘study English’, however, the texts can sometimes become like chores or homework, as if they have lost that moment of importance and joy. It is as if taking on the disciplinary consciousness can, at first, get in the way of the art, and sometimes people say thing like ‘analysing a poem kills it’. (Although, compare: no one ever says ‘you are murdering this landscape by doing geography all over it’ or ‘that maths is butchering my enjoyment of numbers’). The gamble of English is that thinking about texts as a literary critic, when one has a sense of what this means, makes the texts more enjoyable, more profound and more interesting, not less, although it can be the case that learning to think as a critic, using that disciplinary consciousness, can be challenging at first. Again, part of the point of this book is to try to make this easier. One of my proudest teaching moments was a student who rather tentatively said to me, ‘I really enjoyed this novel…even though I had to write an essay about it’. Another English graduate writes that the purity of pleasure from art/literature is unlike anything that you get from anywhere else. The way it can feel like it’s channelling straight into your soul, bypassing the brain. It makes you feel like you’re not thinking about it, but you are. Is that not what disciplinary consciousness or ‘studying’ is? Working out what questions you are asking (without even realising), or how asking different questions makes you

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think about it differently? Or why it makes you feel the way it does – happy, sad, hopeful, scared. In education, there can be a tension between the need to learn skills and get qualifications and the less concrete but still very real feeling of personal (and communal) growth. English is right at this point of tension because it is about deeply significant things – personal response and experience, beauty, passion, interest, otherness, community, delight – which are all really hard to pin down for an exam. Being a literature student involves ‘living through’ this tension, to find, ideally, ways in which it is productive; where, say, your passion for a writer leads you to do your very best, most interesting work. As my friend Simon says, you can jump through the hoops you have to jump through by doing the things you want to do anyway. Problems in English and ‘disciplinary consciousness’ Is there a right answer? Thinking about English in this way, as a discipline, offers answers to a number of common student questions and confusions. I’ve already highlighted the tension that seems to arise between love and study. Another concrete way this appears is in the totally fair question: is there a ‘right answer’? While it’s often said that there is no ‘right answer’ in English, papers are marked, authorities on literature are deferred to and tests revised for, so it looks as if everybody secretly assumes that there really is a right answer and a way to get the best grades. Another version of ‘the right answer’ is the idea that a book has a single, correct ‘hidden meaning’ that the student has to uncover. Why are students and teachers of English caught in this contradiction? And what are the consequences? Focusing on ‘the right answer’ can lead to all sorts of problems, as Patrick Scott’s excellent Reconstructing A-level English points out. For example, it can lead to the idea that an author choses a theme on which to write and then decorates it to make it interesting. The job of the student is then, to uncover the theme, like cracking a code. (What if there was no simple message or moral in the text? And, more worryingly, is the author always right about their own work? I discuss this in Chapter 8.) The sense of a ‘right answer’ might mean that ‘we’ all are forced to feel that ‘we’ must enjoy the book and that ‘we’ must also find it a masterpiece; ‘we’ becomes not inclusive but coercive. It can create an internal split between the person reading the

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book (who might not like it) and the person who is supposed to be, say, writing an essay about the book (who has to pretend they do). A symptom of this twisting is that students often write ‘the play is flawed because…’ or ‘this character is engaging because…’ as a way of expressing ‘I don’t like this’ or ‘I like this character’. Another symptom is the clash between writing in the third person (‘he/she/the reader’) rather than the first (‘I’) because it is assumed to be more objective, while at the same time, students are often told that their informed personal (‘I think…’) response is what is being sought. Finally, the idea of the ‘we’ suggests that literary texts have only one meaning, and that disagreements are only ways to uncover that one meaning, rather than being (what they really are) different ways of interpreting that same text. This suggests that a novel, poem or play can be reduced to ‘the right answers’ in student guidebooks like York Notes or on Wikipedia. But perhaps the most insidious problem caused by searching for the ‘right answer’ is that some books become ‘course texts’, while other texts, which you might read or enjoy in your spare time, do not. It can seem that ‘course texts’ have to be read – interpreted – in the same way as teachers and examiners read them, and that you have to share their presuppositions to ‘get it right’ or ‘find the hidden meaning’ (no wonder these course books often seem hard to read); the others books you read, films you see and games you play don’t seem to be like that (as the arguments you have with your friends about them demonstrate). This division between what English sometimes claims to be doing (inviting you to respond to a text) and what it does (teaching you to respond in one particular way, corresponding to one set of presuppositions) has a number of consequences. Perhaps most importantly, this ‘split’ makes a personal response impossible and often discounts a student’s own experience, reading, ideas and presuppositions as ‘wrong’. Students could be inhibited in their responses because they discover that there is a hidden agenda. Indeed, students might learn to speak two different ‘languages’: one about their course texts and one about the books and poems read, the films and TV watched, websites visited, blogs written and viewed and the music listened and danced to in their free time. Precisely because of these conflicting messages, the subject can seem much harder than it should, and sometimes the only way students can resolve these mixed messages is to find English either impossible or simply irrelevant to their own experience. A third-year English student from Sheffield, Kathryn Jamshidi, describes exactly this in an online essay ‘You’re an English student who doesn’t read?’ from 2016. Growing up, she ‘devoured a whole host of young adult fiction’, but, as she did her A-level and began her English degree, she discovered that

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the ‘texts that I was supposed to read did not appeal to me, and the ones that I wanted to read seemed invalid’: ‘I was a fraud; an English student who did not read’. She describes how students are trained to ‘satisfy the top end of the marking criteria by simply relaying their teacher’s understanding of the text in an assured tone’: what she calls ‘manufactured reading’ (she takes the term from an article by Marcello Giovanelli and Jessica Mason), where students are not offered the opportunity to experience and interpret the text for themselves, where English is ‘done to them’. However, as she went through her degree, she discovered that these assumptions about English were incorrect or, at least, disconnected. Theory and wider reading challenged her, and she reshaped her ‘disciplinary consciousness’ to become a ‘reawakened reader’. Similarly, it’s often said that you ‘you can say what you want as long as you can argue for it’, and this is true to some extent. However, seeking ‘the right answer’ often gets in the way even of this. First, in learning to support a ‘non-conventional’ argument, you need material and ideas that are rarely provided precisely because they aren’t conventional. For example, you would find it hard to write an essay offering a psychological interpretation of a text if you had never been told what such an approach might involve or even that such an approach existed. (Students, on discovering a theoretical interpretation that is new to them quite often say things like: ‘this is something like I was thinking all along! And it’s OK to think this, and it’s a valid idea – I’m not mad or wrong and there’s a whole discourse, a developed way of talking about exactly this!’). Second, the way you are taught to argue relies on presuppositions, which you end up taking on board perhaps without even realising you are doing so; so how you argue and what counts as a good argument is already ‘set up’. Is it a surprise that class after class of students in the end had the same opinion of Shakespeare’s Othello if they were all surreptitiously drilled in the same basic ideas? But the idea of ‘the right answer’ in English is not only bad for students but also for teachers. Many teachers – rightly, I think – treasure the idea that English is not like other subjects: it aims to encourage freedom, personal responses and understanding. Perhaps even more ambitiously, some teachers have felt that English as a subject has a mission to make people more free and fulfilled in their lives and choices. Yet they often felt confined by assumptions from the middle of the twentieth century, preserved in educational formaldehyde. Worse than just memorising facts, to be good at English, students were forced to ‘take for granted’ a very different set of attitudes and ideas. Teaching events like videos, summer schools, YouTube clips, performances, visits by actors and so on often showed how texts could

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be exciting and relevant. But if the bottom line was the marks, then much of this was wasted. This left many teachers frustrated and angry. But perhaps the most damaging consequence of ‘the right answer’ for teachers at A-level (and their students) has been the Assessment Objectives, or, more accurately, the outlook that they can engender. Of course, all disciplines in the National Curriculum have Assessment Objectives, and the idea behind them is a good one (and especially apposite for English): rather than assuming that ‘everybody knows’ how to do the subject and that there is one, unspoken right way of interpreting, the Assessment Objectives aim to make transparent what is required. That is, they were meant to be signposts to the sort of questions critics ask, to thinking as a critic. Originally, the Assessment Objectives were supposed be holistic, reflecting a larger ‘disciplinary consciousness’. However, in some classes, they have become instead a tick-box exercise, encouraging an atomistic rather than a more rounded view of a literary text. So it looks as if the search for ‘the right answer’ in English – and behind it the perfectly right search for good marks – leads to all sorts of problems. The way to resolve these problems is to think about becoming a critic (or as Kathryn Jamshidi puts it, a reawakened reader) as a process. Learning a disciplinary consciousness doesn’t happen in one go. I said it would be mad and impossible to simply learn all the answers to mathematical problems; instead you learn a method, a way of thinking. This is true for English, although it can be a longer process. Two educators, Barbara Bleiman and Lucy Webster, suggest that in English there are six steps. (In real life these all ooze into each other, so breaking it down like this is just to help think about it). First, you begin with your own initial response to the text. This could be enthusiastic or interested or even a negative response (even being bored is an interesting response; why didn’t the text grab you?). Whichever it is, you should think about why you responded as you did. Second, it’s important to listen carefully to the responses of your friends and other people in your group. Somebody else may have seen something that you missed or may have a very different take on the text. When we read Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818), I felt sorry for the (poor) monster; my class mates didn’t at all. Criticism you read can be a bit like this too: different points of view that make you think. Third, you could begin respond to ‘soundbites’ about the text: short ideas or suggestions that illuminate it, or suggestions from your teacher. You might come up with some initial ideas from looking at an online guide to the author or a relevant critical essay. Actually, titles for essays are very

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often ‘soundbites’ that exist to make you think. So, a good ‘soundbite’ for Frankenstein might be from the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle: ‘He who is unable to live in society… must be either a beast or a god’. Victor Frankenstein, who makes the monster alone in his lab, away from everyone, is aspiring to be a god, creating new life; the monster, also alone and isolated, becomes a beast. The fourth next step would be to read critical essays or reviews about the text. Just like you, these critics will have ideas and points of view that will guide their response to the text and you can begin to ask what ‘position’ each critic is writing from. For example, one critic, Franco Moretti (b. 1950), writes that the monster is denied a name and an individuality. He is the Frankenstein monster; he belongs wholly to his creator (just as one can speak of ‘a Ford worker’). Like the workers, he is a collective and artificial creature. He is not found in nature, but built. Moretti points out that the monster is literally made of the bodies of the poor, stolen from graves, reshaped and given an identity by modern science and industry. Moretti is obviously a critic with an interest in how politics and history shape a literary work and its contexts. In the fifth stage, rather than reading a critic who develops their own ideas, you could yourself explore different critical positions on the text (you could think of yourself as a feminist critic, say, or one who is interested in the ethical or political issues in a text). Arguing from a certain position can be very revealing, and it also involves discovering something about the critical approaches themselves. (You will probably have begun to think about these approaches in step four.) The final step is when you ‘own’ a critical position, when a set of ideas becomes part of your ‘literary critical’ tool kit, always ready to hand. This sixth stage leads back, of course, to the first stage, only now your initial response will be much more informed and analytic. (Indeed, another reason why there is no ‘right answer’ is that there is no real end to this constantly developing and circular process). These six stages also show that the disciplinary consciousness of English is developed as a process by studying particular texts and ideas and then reflecting back on wider concepts and assumptions, moving between the general and the particular. Understanding English, then, is not about knowing the right answer: it’s about ‘thinking as’ a literary critic – which might lead to very divergent understandings of a literary text.

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Why is there jargon in English? Jargon is a word you will hear people outside our discipline (and some inside) use to attack how literature is discussed. However, the idea of disciplinary consciousness in English also helps to explain why we use technical terms or jargon. There are three sorts of technical terms. The first sort is more simply descriptive. It’s easier to say ‘iambic verse’ than ‘verse that goes “du-dum du-dum du-dum du-dum”’. A ‘subtext’ is not a ‘hidden meaning’ but what is going on beneath the level of the text. The second sort is made up of terms that implicitly present a wider critical approach. Each set of critical terms brings with it its own presuppositions and ideas, and different approaches use different terms (although some do overlap). In general, these terms actually work in the same way as the more descriptive terms (it is easier, for example, to say ‘reification’ or ‘objectification’ – after explaining them, of course – than to repeat ‘the processes of thought that turn people into things’).Technical terms can be off-putting, but simply to oppose technical terms or the complex ideas about literature they embody, as some people do, assumes that there could be a ‘natural’ way of interpreting that does without a ‘technical language’ of any sort. It also assumes that doing English should be easier than a subject like chemistry or sociology, where technical terms abound. The third sort of technical terms are perhaps the most interesting; sometimes jargon words or phrases can be the sedimented forms of those questions and debates that have shaped the field (as in, say, ‘the words on the page’ means close reading in Chapter 2; or, as you will see, ‘the death of the author’ in Chapter 8). In part, learning a disciplinary consciousness means learning what these sedimented forms mean. You don’t have to study English to read books, so what makes English special? Disciplinary consciousness also goes some way to another issue that is often raised in relation to English. You don’t have to be an English student to read novels or to have a critical opinion about a film, so what makes English special or different from normal, everyday conversations about books, films or other texts? It’s certainly the case that people who aren’t English students know about Dickens or Shakespeare and have illuminating things to say about them.

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Some people have found this a threat; I once heard a story of a professor who said, grandly, ‘I refuse to discuss my work with amateurs’. I think its honest to admit that there are all different sorts of expertise on literary texts and that the disciplinary consciousness of English represents only one way of coming to understand literature and other texts. Or, more accurately, and as I have been arguing, it is an interweaving of many ways, because perhaps one difference is that literary critics can see many different interpretations of a text and are not driven to find just one ‘correct’ reading. Further, English certainly can give precision, detail and complexity to analysing texts and, as a subject, it teaches an impressive number of skills for the workplace (I discuss these in Chapter 13). And, of course, just as seeing more films means you have a wider field to compare this film with, so reading more books gives you a wider field of comparison. However, it is also true that the debates and questions that make up the disciplinary consciousness can explore more deeply, or even resolve, some of the problems that people have in approaching art. For example, in newspapers or online, journalists find it easier to gossip about the writer’s life than discuss the work that has made the writer interesting in the first place. In other areas – in the worlds of computer games or in science-fiction fandom – extraordinarily combative and painful arguments about gender, race and class are repeating arguments had in English over the years. By exploring these arguments in the subject of English, we can discover what is at stake in these other areas and why. Conclusion Disciplinary consciousness represents the idea of ‘metacognition’, which I mentioned in Chapter 1: knowing not just the content of a subject but also knowing what you are doing and why. As the world becomes more information rich, and you can discover facts instantaneously, knowing why they are important and what they mean is even more significant and leads, as the educationalist John Hattie argues, to better marks. But the most important reason to think about the disciplinary consciousness of English is that it allows us to think and talk not only about texts but how we come to understand and interpret texts. It helps dialogue and discussion; if it does not generate consensus – and perhaps we might be suspicious of too much consensus – it does at least create informed dissensus.

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Summary ·· A discipline involves ‘thinking as a’; English involves thinking as a literary critic. ·· Thinking about disciplinary consciousness helps resolve problems found in studying English, such as: Is there a right answer? Why are there technical terms? ·· We learn the disciplinary consciousness of English as a process.

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5 Critical attitudes

·· Where should we start with thinking about how we read? ·· What is the intrinsic attitude? ·· What is the extrinsic attitude?

English can appear to be quite daunting once you realise that there’s a ­near-infinite number of ways you can read. If you’re told to explore different methods of interpretation, challenge your presuppositions and think about how you read, where are you supposed to start? In the last chapter, I suggested that learning about different critical approaches or theories is a process that you go through. A step in this process is to look for patterns in the way these critical approaches work. To do this is to look for the presuppositions behind them and to think about the contexts in which texts are understood. In this chapter, I shall outline one pattern that can be used as a starting point for thinking about a wide variety of critical approaches. Into the text or out from the text? If you look at a painting, are you looking through a window to another world or are you simply looking at the composition of colour and shape on a flat canvas? If you see a painting as a window, you might be concerned with

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what is going on behind the window: who the people are, for example, and why they had their picture painted. You might ask about the historical significance of, for example, the skull on the shelf or even why the painter chose that particular subject in the first place. If, however, a picture is only a flat canvas, then you would ask different questions: about how the tones contrast, or how the shapes relate to one another. You might just be struck by the beautiful range of colours. This same contrast occurs in thinking about literature. When you read a novel, poem or play, how do you approach it? Do you look at it as a beautifully woven fabric of language? Or as an example of writing that tells you about the historical period in which it was written? Is it stimulating because it puts words together in a new way? Or because it pours out on paper the intense experiences and interesting ideas of a particular writer? When we study English, do we study literary works for their pure artistic merit or because they reveal things about the world and their authors? Do you think of yourself as going into the text for itself or coming out from the text to explore other issues? You don’t have to choose one or the other, but these illustrate critical attitudes. One of the longest debates in English has been about whether interpretation should focus on the text as a text itself (a flat canvas) or on the text as evidence for something else, such as its historical period and its attitudes, or an author’s life (a window on a world). In an influential book called Theory of Literature, published as long ago as 1949, two critics, René Wellek and Austin Warren, called these two contrasting positions the intrinsic and extrinsic approaches to literature. These two terms are not the names for critical approaches themselves – instead they name contrasting sorts of presuppositions, tendencies or attitudes taken by approaches to literary texts. This debate, because it discusses what happens when we interpret in different ways and compares different methods of interpretation, is an example of hermeneutics, the study of interpretation. Certainly the debate has become more complex since 1949, but intrinsic and extrinsic are a good place to start. Intrinsic attitudes: Into the text The intrinsic attitude is often called ‘formalism’ because it is concerned, above all else, with the form of the text, its structure and language. It assumes that there is something special and uniquely ‘literary’ in the way literary texts use language. Because of this, the intrinsic attitude concentrates on the language of the text as its central object, considering things like the choice

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of metaphors, the use of symbols, structure, style, contrasts, images and the development of the plot to work out what a text means. Although these forms of criticism might sound rather dull and unrewarding, following the intricate paths taken in a text and looking closely at the twists and turns of its language can produce quite remarkable readings and effects. In fact, the very intense scrutiny of the ‘words on the page’ can result in the most unusual and challenging interpretations of texts, as the multiple and often unclear meanings of each word are weighed up and evaluated. As you concentrate on the words themselves, their meaning becomes not clearer but more ambiguous (or indeterminate). This is most obvious when looking at poetry. For example, there is a sonnet by the English poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850) called Composed upon Westminster Bridge, which describes all of London, seen from the bridge at dawn, stretched out and radiant: ‘Earth has not anything to show more fair’ and the city ‘like a garment’ wears ‘the beauty of the morning’. The poem finishes with these lines: Dear God! The very houses seem asleep And all that mighty heart is lying still. The first meaning of ‘lying still’ is that the city is spread out, not moving, lying motionless asleep. But the word ‘lying’ has another meaning, of course: to lie is not to tell the truth. Perhaps the sonnet is implying that the city, despite all the beauty of the morning light, is still not telling the truth. The sunrise makes London look wonderful but really the city, ‘that mighty heart’, is still a den of deceit, corruption, falsehood and lies. By concentrating on the language – on the form of the text – two separate readings have emerged. On the one hand, London is beautiful, quiet and still in the dawn light. On the other, London seems beautiful, but underneath and despite all this beauty it is deceitful and corrupt. These readings are contradictory and mutually exclusive: either London is really deeply beautiful and peaceful or it’s actively scheming, lying and dishonest. Which reading you choose depends on the way you interpret ‘lying still’. All ways of reading share this concentration on language to some extent, but, for the critics who tend towards the intrinsic attitude, studying English is principally a matter of looking at the ‘words on the page’ with great rigour. Those who cherish ‘practical criticism’ or ‘close reading’ find the value of literature in the special sort of manipulation of language that happens, they argue, only in literature. This sort of intrinsic approach to literature is still very influential and important (in fact, some form of ‘close reading’ of texts is central to most

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subjects). When you are asked to do a ‘practical criticism’, ‘write an appreciation’ or ‘appraisal’, ‘analyse the main poetic methods’, pay ‘close attention to meaning, language and structure’, investigate the ‘style’ or ‘narrative technique’, or even ‘comment on the author’s skill in suggesting unspoken feelings through incident and description’, you are being asked to take an intrinsic approach to literature. Even questions on character or plot, although they seem to have a wider focus, usually lead you to take this approach. More, when you do creative writing or critical rewriting (as I discuss in Chapter 11), these sorts of concerns are often uppermost in your mind. This is close to an artist’s approach to literary craft: what word goes where to what effect? Although it offers important insights, used alone, this intrinsic attitude does have blind spots and rests upon some rather large assumptions, as I outlined in Chapter 3. To recap: some critics claim that intrinsic types of criticism lead to ‘objective’ readings, the idea that texts can be independent of their historical, social and personal context, and that ‘literary-ness’ makes a text a valuable work of art, which is worth studying in its own right. However, even if you claim only to be looking at the text by itself, you bring your own ideas, expectations and experiences to it. Can any judgement of worth be objective? Extrinsic attitudes: Out of the text In contrast, extrinsic methods of interpretation take it for granted that the literary text is part of the world and rooted in its context. An extrinsic critic considers that the job of criticism is to move from the text outwards to some other, not specifically literary, object or idea. Such critics use literary texts to explore other ideas about things in the world and, in turn, use other ideas to explain the literary text. Perhaps the most important and widespread sort of extrinsic criticism is the way of reading that puts texts firmly into their historical context. This is why the extrinsic attitude is often referred to as historicist. Historicist criticism, and there are many, many versions of it, uses literary texts to explore or discuss historical issues and, conversely, it uses history and context to explain literary texts. In dealing with Shakespeare’s King Lear, for example, a historicist critic might look through the play to find clues about what was expected of a king at the time Shakespeare was writing and how the ruler and the nation were thought to be woven together. By the same token, a historicist critic might also use evidence from Shakespeare’s time and its historical context to explain the play. But historicist criticism is not limited

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to works from the past; you could use another form of historical criticism to study a contemporary popular novel – a ‘bestseller’. Looking at the way people behave in the novel, even if it might not be considered a great work of art, would reveal all sorts of interesting contemporary social attitudes. The way two young adults deal with the experience of having cancer and falling in love, for example, might indicate a great deal about attitudes to the body, health and society, for example. Conflicting views on the oppressed, whether human or not (elves, for example), might tell us a great deal about profounder debates in wider society. But more than just in terms of history, the idea of looking beyond a text to ‘the world’ is very attractive to those who emphasise the way in which literature is linked to the world. Many new forms of extrinsic criticism have emerged as academics have sought ways of reflecting the changes in contemporary society. Critics who use psychoanalysis as a way of reading might understand a literary text as a product of the author’s psychology or as a way of understanding parts of the human mind in general. In fact, the work of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) and other psychoanalysts has been widely used to interpret literature. Those who explicitly champion political positions use literary texts as evidence for wider historical and political arguments, showing how people have suffered from and fought against injustice. The many forms of feminist criticism use literary texts to explore the roles of women and men, amongst other things. Ecocriticism explores how literature makes us aware of our environment, urban or rural; often these critics focus on ‘nature writing’ to argue that literary texts are the best way to help us think about what it is to ‘be’ with the natural world. Other critics start with the text and draw conclusions about, say, nature, humanity or the pitfalls of love: a sort of philosophical criticism. Approaches that utilise the possibilities of digitisation are able to scan in seconds more texts than a human could read in order to, for example, identify strings of words or phrases and so make arguments about historical change, are also extrinsic (this is sometimes even called ‘distant reading’). Even biographical approaches that consider the author’s intention or her or his life display the extrinsic attitude, since neither the author nor her or his biography are actually in the text; journalists do this with contemporary authors, digging into their life to find the ‘source’ of the story, quite as much a scholar does this with writers of the past. Those who oppose extrinsic critical attitudes point to the fact that, in using this approach, you start with a literary text but move away to an object or idea that is not specifically literary or even appears in the text you are

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studying at all. They argue that in doing so, you do not actually deal with literature at all but rather with politics, identity, the mind, history, gender relations, biography and so on. If you approach a text as if it were a piece of evidence for history, opponents say, then it is no different from a treaty, a will or any other piece of historical documentation. If you read a novel to learn about the author, the novel itself is no more than a piece of evidence for a biography and no different from a diary entry. What makes the text special as ‘literature’ is not of interest. Contrasting these two attitudes Looking at the key aspects of these attitudes, as shown in Table 5.1, is a useful way to compare and contrast them. These oppositions have been the subject of fierce debate, and you will come across signs of this at different levels and in different ways right Table 5.1  Intrinsic and extrinsic critical attitudes Intrinsic attitude

Extrinsic attitude

Into the text

Out from the text to the context

A flat canvas

A window

Literature is worth studying in its Literature is worth studying for what it tells us own right; it uses language in a about other things unique way ‘Great texts’ are the focus because they have artistic and possibly moral worth

Any sort of text is worthy of study, as they all reveal ‘the world’

‘Formalism’

‘Historicism’

‘Words on the page’

Context

Meanings often indeterminate

Context decides meaning

Practical criticism, ‘close reading’ Historicism, psychoanalytical criticism, explicitly and New Criticism political criticism, feminisms, eco-criticism, philosophical criticism, digital criticism, distant reading, biography and other sorts of criticism

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Text stands alone

Text only has meaning in context

Knowledge of the text alone

Knowledge of the context (history, author’s life and so on)

Style, plot, character

Theme, setting

C r i t i c a l at t i t u d e s

through the discipline of English. Both these general attitudes are valid, as are the critical methods they stimulate. Even if they do have ‘blind spots’, both have a role to play in English as a whole. Sometimes the most useful works of criticism are produced by a coming together of these two attitudes in different ways. Thinking about these general patterns helps to orient you by explaining why approaches to literature have developed in the way they have. This introductory guide to critical attitudes also makes it more straightforward for you to draw parallels between different approaches and to explore the presuppositions and blind spots of any particular approach. Summary ·· One way to think about the presupposition of reading is to divide critical theories into two broad groups or attitudes: intrinsic and extrinsic. ·· Intrinsic ways of reading concentrate on words on the page. A work is considered separate from the world and the focus is on its internal features. Critics who support the intrinsic attitude rely on language and structure to decide what a text means. ·· Extrinsic ways of reading look beyond the text to the context. The literary text is seen as part of the world and critics move through the words on the page to broader, non-literary ideas like history or biography, which are, in turn, used to explain what a text might mean. ·· Both these attitudes have blind spots and gaps. Intrinsic approaches are criticised for assuming that there can be an objective way of reading and for separating literature from ‘the real world’. Extrinsic attitudes are criticised for failing to see ‘literature’ as something special and preferring to discuss non-literary ideas. ·· Thinking about these general patterns helps to orient you when you look at different critical approaches, to draw parallels between different approaches and to explore the presuppositions of any particular approach.

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part II

what We Read

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6 Literature, value and the canon

·· ·· ·· ··

Can literature be defined? What is literary value? What is the canon? How does the canon affect you?

How we read shapes what we read. Debates over the texts you should study, and even what literature is, are central to English. Can literature be defined? When we go into a bookshop or library or visit an online store, we know basically what to expect in the literature section. But if we try to answer the question ‘What is literature?’ no definition seems satisfactory. There are always countless exceptions to every rule. For example, if you defined literature as fiction, where would you put fact-based writing, such as autobiographies or plays and novels that portray historical events? Where would you put the poems that claim not to be fictional but to reveal a ‘higher’ truth? If you wanted to suggest that literature ‘represents the world’ (that it was, to use the technical term, mimetic), what would you do with the surreal poems, plays and novels that don’t seem to represent the world at all? And, after all,

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don’t other forms of writing – historical, scientific – claim to represent the world as well? Literature can’t exclusively be something that ‘tells a story’, either. How would this be any different from, for example, a medical textbook ‘telling the story’ of the symptoms caused by a particular disease or a scientist detailing what happens in an experiment to measure cosmic rays? You might argue that a work of literature was something that moved you or entertained you, but what would you call a novel that one of your friends loved but left you cold? You might call it ‘bad literature’, but would you say it wasn’t literature at all? Again, if you wanted to argue that literature should convey a message, what would you do with writing that didn’t seem to convey messages or literature that was ambiguous about exactly what message it might be carrying? Besides any of this, couldn’t you argue that a song or a sandwich or a bowl of noodles like your grandmother made might move you just as much as words on paper? It is easier to understand literature not as something that can be defined but as something that overflows or escapes from any attempt to limit it or put it in a box (to define something means to set limits to it). As you try to give it a definite meaning, literature slips through your fingers like water. But then, perhaps literature is not a ‘thing’ at all, which is why it slips away when you try to categorise it. Reading, after all, is more like a process you are engaged in, something you do. Perhaps literature is more like a verb, a ‘doing’, than it is a noun or thing. All this is made more complex by the fact that, historically, the category of texts known as ‘literature’ has changed a great deal. In fact, when the word was first used in the English language from the late fourteenth century, it didn’t mean a type of text at all but rather what we now call ‘literacy’, a sort of ‘knowledge of books’. By the nineteenth century, ‘literature’ did mean a body of writing but included what we would call history, biography, philosophy, sociology, science and much more. It simply meant something written on a certain subject. We still just about have this sense of literature – a pile of pamphlets about technological advances might be called scientific literature – but more importantly, we seem to have invented, and now take for granted, a separate category of literature, or sometimes even capital L, Literature, which means something quite different. These philosophical and historical discussions over the identity of literature lead to a fundamental question for anyone studying English: if there is no clear, defined area of study, how do you decide which texts to read? After all, there are far too many books to read in any one lifetime. When we study English, we choose our literary texts or, more accurately and more

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problematically, the texts are chosen for us. Those who have made the choices and shaped many English syllabi have done so with a certain idea in mind: that of literary value. What is literary value? Knowingly or not, the idea of ‘Literature with a capital L’ is used to make a value judgement about the worth of a piece of writing. People say ‘this is a truly great novel, it’s Literature’. In this sense, Literature doesn’t just mean words on pages but also a certain sort of highly valued and important writing, and it used to be taken for granted that people studying literature read only ‘great’ literature – or Literature. On the one hand, there something right about this; wonderful books expand your world, open your mind and make you feel and think in new ways. On the other, being told what texts you should love and why (and perhaps not finding them so delightful) can be very off-putting. More, sometimes the books described as great can be hard to read: perhaps far from us in time and context or in more demanding language. The poet Ezra Pound (1885–1970) suggested that writing good poetry should be as hard as learning to play the piano well; I think something similar is true for reading too. Reading is something you do, an activity, and learning to read well is like learning to play an instrument: it’s challenging. As a musician, you have to become attuned to your instrument and to the music you want play; to improve, you practice and play more sophisticated pieces of music. The same goes for reading. You have to become attuned to your own processes of reading and interpretation: thinking about how you interpret. You also have to become attuned to the literature you are reading, and different works make different demands. Sometimes, this means understanding the historical context better; sometimes it can mean becoming used to more sophisticated uses of language. (Here’s an embarrassingly simple example of how texts can be less or more demanding. Some books just tell you that ‘he felt sad’ or ‘she felt angry’. In others, you are shown this instead: ‘he turned away and looked down’; ‘her faced flushed as she clenched her fists’. Which is less demanding? And which is closer to life?). This process of becoming attuned might rely on something else entirely, because one of the characteristics of literature is that it’s not easily predictable. There’s no set one ‘way in’ to a literary text. Sometimes this process of becoming attuned can be frustrating, but in the end, it can open brilliance for you. Moreover, like a musician, if you go back to the earlier things you have read, you find you can play them

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or read them in new ways and find new density in them. Or, again, reading well is like playing a sport well: the fitter you are, the better you get at the sport; the more you play, the more skilful you become and the better you get at reading the game, knowing what’s going on, predicting the next passage of play. You become, again, attuned to what is going on in your body and in the game. Reading literature is no different. The job of English teachers and books about literature is to help you to become more attuned to your own self and to the texts you are reading and so become a better reader. The idea of literary value became highly contentious, however, when these ideas about what is great literature become solidified in lists of ‘great books’ we should read and admire, known as the canon. This process of taken-forgranted ‘solidification’ is why the same novels, poems and plays turn up again and again on literature courses and in exams. (Recall the Sheffield student from Chapter 4 who found that being expected simply to adore great works, and finding them hard, made her an English student who didn’t read; and surely every English student – and teacher – has felt the same at least occasionally). The texts in the canon and the criteria for selection are among the most contentious issues in English, and so I’m going to discuss the canon in some detail. What is the canon? The origins of the canon Where the idea of the canon came from is unclear; the term itself comes from the Christian Church. Faced with a number of texts about Jesus and the early Christians and with the Hebrew Scriptures, and also with disputes about which sources to trust, the Catholic Church decided at the Council of Trent in 1546 that some of the texts were true sources of ‘divine revelation’ – and so were ‘canonical’ – and that others were not. The aim was to create a list of religious texts that everybody would accept as authentic and authoritative. Eighteenth-century philologists took this desire for ‘authentic and authoritative’ texts into the study of language. Because there were a huge number of forgeries of ancient Greek and Roman texts, these philologists aimed to establish a ‘canon’ of texts that were really Greek and Roman. Also important for the construction of the idea of the canon is the concept of genre. The poets and writers of the Renaissance (roughly 1450–1650) also produced lists, ranking the most important types, or genres, of writing (‘genre’ basically means ‘kind’ or ‘type’ of literary text). The British poet

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Sir Phillip Sidney (1554–1586) produced a list that classed poetry by type: epic, lyric, comic, satiric, elegiac, amatory, pastoral sonnet, epigram. Epic poetry – about the origins of nations and peoples – was the greatest, most enduring and most significant form, while short poems about love were the most transient and insubstantial. (These days we have many genres of literary text, normally divided not by form but by content). By the eighteenth century, it was common to find debates not only over the worth of particular genres of poetry but also over the worth of particular writers. A critic called Joseph Warton (1722–1800) wrote that in ‘the first class I would place our only three sublime and pathetic poets: Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton’ (‘pathetic’ meant ‘moving’ or ‘poignant’ at this time). Such a reference to ‘our’ poets shows how the idea of literary value was becoming linked to that of nationalism. The ideas of authority, authenticity, genre value and nationalism began to come together even more closely in the nineteenth century. Perhaps most influential in the formation of the canon were the many anthologies of poetry popular in the nineteenth century. One of the most famous of these was the Golden Treasury of English Verse, compiled by Francis Turner Palgrave (1824–1897), first published in 1861, often re-edited and republished. It’s still in print and still popular today. The title of The Golden Treasury of English Verse is itself very revealing; just as the national treasury has the authority to make financial decisions on behalf of the nation, so a treasury of poetry has taken upon itself the authority to decide which poems should be considered the most valuable. Just as a nation’s treasury contains the material goods – money – most valuable to its people, this treasury contains the poems most valuable to its readers. On the very first page, Palgrave said that he aimed to ‘include... all the best original Lyrical pieces and songs in our language, by writers not living – and none but the best’. In judging what to include or exclude, Palgrave used two criteria: the types (genres) of poetry and the ‘genius’ of the poet. No didactic poems (poems intended to instruct), no humorous poems and no narrative poems (those simply telling a story) were allowed in. Only poems relying on what he called ‘some single thought, feeling or situation’ were worthy to be allowed into The Golden Treasury. But the poems also had to be ‘worthy of the writer’s genius’. This means that the writer already had to be recognised as a major poet in order to be included, and the poem had to show off their particular talent. However, is it possible to be, as Palgrave claims he is, without ‘caprice or particularity’ about a writer’s talent? In the 1861 edition of The Golden Treasury, for example, there were no poems by the radical working-class poet William Blake (1757–1827). Even more significantly, there were no poems by women in the early editions

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of the anthology. Does this show that a poet had to be of a certain class and gender before Palgrave would even consider their poems? The word anthology comes from Greek and means ‘a collection of flowers’ (and so of poems), which sounds lovely but is clearly less innocent than it appears: a subtle nuance between what you love and what you should love. In the nineteenth century, the idea of the canon of English literature, with Shakespeare at its core (as the next chapter shows), became central to an idea of Englishness. Michael Gardiner has suggested that the canon was a cultural analogy to the famously unwritten constitution of the United Kingdom, as a force working to unite and regulate the disparate nations and classes of the state. The canon and English These historical threads form the backdrop to the development of the modern canon. What we recognise as the canon today grew up hand in hand with the discipline of English in the early years of the twentieth century. It is here that the assumptions of value, authenticity and authority come clearly into focus and are, while still linked to national identity, expanded to a universal scale. Crucial for the development of this was the poet and critic T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) and the critics F. R. Leavis (1895–1978) and Q. D. Leavis (1906–1981). As I’ve suggested, Eliot’s essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) was perhaps the most influential single essay in the history of the discipline of English, shaping the subject and making a claim for literature and its study. Eliot argues that each artist writes in relation to a tradition, not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. For Eliot, a tradition isn’t just the past but a living thing, organised, structured and present in the mind – or even in the bones – of a great writer (always a ‘he’ for Eliot). This ‘living tradition’ of great literature makes up what Eliot later calls an ‘ideal order’, which ranks the great and valuable works. This is clearly a canon. In order to write a great poem, novel or play or to appreciate a great work of literary art fully, Eliot argues that it is necessary that ‘we’ have these works in their ‘ideal order’ in our ‘bones’. If this order is in our bones, it is part of who we are, not something we have to think about.

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‘We’ must have internalised and accepted not only the list of works that people like Palgrave decided were great but also, more importantly, the criteria that guided their judgement. Eliot’s idea has two consequences. The first concerns what these authoritative texts are authoritatively telling you. An authoritative list of Classical texts tells you that certain texts are authentically ancient Greek or Roman and not forgeries or inventions; the authority of books of scripture lies in the fact that they are thought to reveal something true about God. But what authenticity does an authoritative list of works of literature reveal? For Eliot and those influenced by him, what underlies a great literary work, what a great work reveals and so therefore what makes it ‘authentic’ are the values of Western European (and within that English) culture and life. The canon, he argues, is the ‘storehouse of Western values’. These Western European values are unquestioningly assumed to be universal human values, the most important values that apply to all people at all times and in all places. This leads to the second consequence: if a text doesn’t seem to demonstrate these ‘universal’ values or expresses different ones, it is not considered valuable and so is excluded from the canon. Eliot’s seemingly innocent metaphor of ‘bones’ in fact reveals a rather frightening idea. It is as if it is not enough just to study the tradition – it must be in your bones, in your body. If you don’t ‘genetically’ share the idea of the canon and the ‘universal’ European values underlying it, you can neither properly appreciate nor write great books. In their book The Decolonization of African Literature, Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike, a trio of African writers and critics, sum this up from their perspective: most of the objections to…the African novel sound like admonitions from imperialist mother hens to their wayward or outright rebellious captive chickens. They cluck: ‘Be Universal! Be Universal!’ And what they don’t consider universal they denounce as anthropological, atavistic [i.e. reverting to an earlier, primitive state], autobiographical, sociological, journalistic, topical ephemera, as not literary. Again, the idea is implied that what doesn’t reveal Western values (masquerading as universal values) simply isn’t authentic literature, is not worth reading and couldn’t be part of the canon. The idea was further developed by F. R. Leavis. Following Eliot’s lead, he asserted that there were a handful of authentic writers who made up core of the canon. For example, he begins his very influential work of 1948,

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The Great Tradition, by stating that the ‘great English Novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad’. Although he admits that other novelists have merits, the best – the ones who most authentically reveal the values he cherishes – are these at the heart of the canon. The reasons he chooses these four are hard to pin down specifically. Of the four, two are British, one is American and one Polish (though both the latter settled in Britain); it’s not their nationality, perhaps, but rather, as Leavis writes that ‘they are significant in terms of that human awareness they promote: awareness of the possibilities of life’, and that they are ‘creative geniuses whose distinction is manifested in their being alive in their time’. This manages to sound both convincing and authoritative and also rather imprecise. (But could a literary judgement ever be ‘precise’ the way a scientific measurement might be?) The Leavises were also scathing about genre fiction: thrillers, adventure stories, science fiction, romances and so on. They regarded these as mechanistic and repetitive (the detective always catches the murderer), sensational, poorly written and removed from life – the literary junk food, which temporarily entertains while not offering any nourishment. (We might think of junk food as a guilty pleasure, but know that if we ate it every day, it would do us harm.) It is interesting to find out which books acute and wellread critics like the Leavises thought were good and why. But their stamp of authority establishes this not just as a list but also as the list we should all share. As discussed earlier, they rely upon a personal sensibility to make judgements they claim to be objective, again because they assume that everyone shares or should share the same English and European values. How does the canon affect you? The canon today The canon is still with us today. It is deeply woven into the fabric not just of English as a subject but also into all forms of culture. TV and film adaptations tend to be of ‘canonical’ novels; publishers print ‘classics’; to count as educated, you are supposed to have read a smattering of ‘canonical novels’. Why is the canon such a powerful idea? First, the canon is a reflection that English always has a social context and could never be done in a vacuum. The canon represents the meeting point between (1) judgements of the artistic (or aesthetic) value of a text and (2) the presupposition and interests, either implicit or explicit, of those who make those judgements and have the power to enforce them. What makes the

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issue difficult is that, despite claims to be ‘objective’ or ‘neutral’, it is very, very hard to separate out an artistic or aesthetic judgement from a judgement based on position and interests. These two are interwoven. Second, the canon is self-perpetuating. In English at all levels, the same canonical texts come up again and again, year after year. A person who studied English and has become a teacher often teaches the texts she or he was taught, in part because she or he was taught that these texts were the most important. As students, you expect to study texts you have heard of and assume are worthwhile and, of course, resources that support your study such as websites, IT resources, guidebooks or videos of productions concentrate on canonical texts, which in a way makes them easier to study. (After all, why would a company produce a guidebook to a novel that only a few people have heard of?) When a school or academic teacher is choosing titles for a curriculum, the canon exerts pressures both explicit and financial. Some students will prefer to take a class with texts they have heard of. Politicians are keen to insist on ‘famous’ or ‘traditional’ writers. More, as students know all too well, the cost of books can be a strain, so an academic might choose a canonical text that is cheap and available over one that is more difficult to obtain in hard copy (that said, and while students generally prefer to read hard copies rather than on screen, the rediscovery and free open access to text from the past is beginning to alter this). Many textbooks for English and books on literature in general assume a familiarity with the canon, which also underlines its centrality. In fact, textbooks from earlier in the twentieth century were often made up literally of lists and descriptions of great books. There are more recent versions of these too, in the books that tell you the ‘100 books to read before you die’ or the ‘lists of great books’ or the online quizzes that ask ‘how many have you read?’ (as if reading was a competition). One, The Western Canon by the American critic Harold Bloom, is a long defence of the idea of the canon and ends with a list of the 1000 books (he thinks) that everyone ‘cultured’ should have read. The canon, then, can be the list of books you expect to study when you do English, and reading the canon can be studying English. The subject and the canon in part define each other. However, even those who make and publish actual lists of ‘great books’ admit that sometimes the lists can change, as certain books come into and out of favour. But the third reason the canon is so powerful is that it creates the criteria by which texts are judged. In the United Kingdom, the government regulates the exam boards and insists that the texts you study at A-level must be of ‘high quality’ and worthy of ‘serious consideration’. But these sort of

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statements give no sort of yardstick to measure this; the values that make a work substantial and give it ‘quality’ are not revealed. This means that even when, for example, A-level exam boards choose books from a wider selection of texts than normal, they first ask if the books have ‘universal significance’, ‘positive values’ or ‘human significance’. Indeed, even saying that a new novel fits the canon because it ‘has’ these qualities reaffirms the idea that an older novel ‘had’ them too. Paradoxically, the canon is not broken up but reaffirmed. The fourth reason the canon remains powerful is that it is involved with the senses of identity to which countries and groups aspire, and with the struggle to define identities. As the history of the canon suggested, its development was tied in with the development of ideas about nationality. It is for this reason that Toni Morrison (b. 1931), the Nobel prize–winning American author, wrote in 1989 that Canon building is empire building. Canon defence is national defence. Canon debate, whatever the terrain, nature and range (of criticism, of history, of the history of knowledge, of the definition of language, the universality of aesthetic principles, the sociology of art, the humanist imagination) is the clash of cultures. And all the interests are vested. Because it is canonical texts that are taught, studied, examined, published, sold, bought, performed, made into TV mini-series, adapted for YouTube parodies, updated into contemporary settings in films and for bestsellers and so on, the canon plays a significant role in creating a sense of shared culture and of collective national identity. Deciding which texts are in the canon is all part of deciding who we are and how we want to see ourselves, and a threat to the canon is a threat to national identity. But does the person creating your course ask how you want to see yourself? As Toni Morrison says, all the interests are vested. Canons tomorrow? Because there are simply too many books to read within the limits of any course, decisions have to be made. Every course has to have a curriculum, which creates, straightway, a sort of a canon. However, since the canon and the texts you study are so important, these decisions stimulate furious, heated and often public debate. And while the idea that there is one canon is perhaps breaking down, ‘canon-thinking’ is still very powerful.

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One area in which the idea of the canon is influential is genre (I discuss genre in more detail in Chapter 10) because ‘Literature with a capital L’ is often compared with ‘genre fiction’ – books that are described as thrillers (or horror story or romance or science fiction or…) and so not considered ‘literary’. One the one hand, there is something to the argument that these are the ‘junk food’ of fiction: often quick to write and repetitive (indeed, almost robotic; one could make a programme to write a thriller); easy to consume (you know what’s going to happen); and often light on nourishment. On the other hand, of course, many genre novels are demanding and have a great deal to say. Precisely because these are ‘popular’ fiction, they are quicker and more responsive to popular taste and so might tell us a great deal about society. More, they often have profound traditions of their own that reward analysis. (Think of fictional detectives as a family: how does Hercule Poirot differ from Sherlock Holmes?) And there are genre canons; indeed, in the Star Wars franchise, fans (and the film makers) argue over what is ‘canon’ or not, drawing on precisely the ‘authentic’ and ‘authoritative’ terms of literary canonical debates. But canon-thinking can also be empowering. Not only are texts that were previously marginalised by the ‘one canon’ now considered important, but new literary traditions have also developed, bringing their own questions and approaches. For example, the American critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr. describes how Black writers started reading and revising each other’s work, situating their representations of their own experience and those of other black people, in the tropes and metaphors of other black writers. That is what a literary tradition is: it is a body of texts defined by signifying relations of revision. As writers shape their own work and explore others, they develop on certain themes and ideas; canons can develop as conversations or arguments. The canon is one of the places where art and politics mix. Those doing and teaching English have more freedom to choose one ‘canon’ over another. The power of the canon makes it essential for us to question what we read. How did it get into the canon? Why? What were the values of those who chose the text? As part of this process of questioning the canon, I will now turn to the figure at the centre of the canon, and (some might argue) at the centre of the discipline of English itself: William Shakespeare.

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Summary ·· No definitions of ‘literature’ seem to be adequate; literature overflows or escapes from any attempt to categorise it. ·· Often unknowingly, we make value judgements about writing; literature can come to mean a certain sort of highly valued and important writing (Literature with a capital L). ·· The list of ‘great books’ that we should read and admire is known as the canon. The process by which texts are chosen to be part of the canon depends upon (questionable) ideas of authenticity, authority, nationalism and literary value. ·· The canon is still with us today, woven into the fabric of Western culture. It is the meeting point between artistic judgement and wider presuppositions; it is self-perpetuating; it sets up the criteria by which texts are judged; it is involved with our sense of identity. ·· The canon appears to be changing and developing into ‘canons’. However it is still vital to know how and why any canon is constructed.

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Why is Shakespeare so central to studying English literature? What are the traditional arguments for studying Shakespeare? What are some of the new ideas about studying Shakespeare? How do these ideas affect the way we study Shakespeare?

Chapter 6 examined the canon in general, and this chapter is going to examine debates about the texts that have been assumed to be the very centre of the canon – the works of William Shakespeare (1564–1616). Debates rage over how best to approach to Shakespeare, but these are rarely explained to students. Shakespeare has become a literary institution, seen by many as the ­unquestionable centre of English studies (indeed, one university vicechancellor joked that he would rename his Department of English as the Department of Shakespeare). In a book written for her niece, Letters to Alice, the novelist Fay Weldon (b. 1931) suggests that writers ‘build Houses of Imagination’ in ‘the City of Invention’. This city has a ‘suburb of sci-fi’, a ‘Romance alley’ and ‘public buildings and worthy

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monuments, which some find boring and others magnificent’. The city is a particularly interesting metaphor for literary value, since, just as in any city, some districts are different: some are considered ‘better’ than others, for example; some people can live in one district and never visit another. Weldon writes that at the ‘heart of the city is the great Castle Shakespeare. You see it whichever way you look. It rears its head into the clouds reaching into the celestial sky, dominating everything around’. Although the huge castle is a ‘rather uneven building, frankly…shoddy, and rather carelessly constructed in parts’, Weldon writes that it ‘keeps standing through the centuries and, build as others may, they can never quite achieve the same grandeur; and the visitors keep flocking, and the guides keep training and re-training, finding yet new ways of explaining the old building’. Weldon’s metaphor shows us that Shakespeare holds his place at the heart of the canon, while apparently other authors try in vain to achieve his stature and literary critics offer new ways of approaching his work. But a castle is not a peaceful place: it is designed to withstand sieges, to play a role in war. Medieval rulers built castles as a sign of ownership and authority, aiming to frighten their subjects into submission. This is true with Shakespeare’s work too; it is constantly marked by conflict and controversy. The institution of Shakespeare divides as much as it unifies, and this is why Weldon’s image of Shakespeare as a castle is so apt; a castle means security for those living within, but it is imposing and even threatening to those outside. Shakespeare’s castle can be seen far beyond the city of literature. It is a worldwide institution. The plays are the most widely and frequently performed across the globe; they are frequently made into movies or adapted (the charming 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) moves Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew from Padua in Italy to Padua High School in California); Shakespeare’s works are used, reused and parodied in literature, on TV and online and are constantly alluded to; his words are adapted daily in speeches, headlines, advertisements or titles (the title The Fault in Our Stars comes from Julius Caesar but also makes a reference to Romeo and Juliet as tragic ‘star-cross’d lovers’). Shakespeare’s phrases have even entered the language: if you have ever not slept a wink, refused to budge an inch, made a virtue of necessity, knitted your brows, stood on ceremony or had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, you’re quoting Shakespeare. Jonathan

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Bate, a leading Shakespearean specialist, writes in his book The Genius of Shakespeare: In British life he seems to be everywhere. He is quoted and adapted daily in newspaper headlines and advertising copy... He has a national, massively subsidised theatre company named after him and committed to the regular revival of all his works. Driving down the M6 motorway, you pass signs indicating the new county you are entering: Cheshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire. But the sign does not say Warwickshire – it says ‘Warwickshire: Shakespeare’s County’. There is a Royal Shakespeare Company in London and Stratford. Shakespeare is considered so important by so many people in the United Kingdom that he is the only compulsory author on the National Curriculum: this means that it is effectively a legal requirement for anybody educated in the United Kingdom to study Shakespeare. After women’s writing, his work is the most studied subject on university English syllabuses – which makes him by far the most-studied single author. However, while it’s certainly traditional, like many things in studying English it’s not immediately obvious to everyone why you should have to study Shakespeare. A British educationalist, John Yandell, asked a group of 12- and 13-year-olds why they would be studying Shakespeare in the year ahead. They gave various answers: ‘It’s part of our education’; ‘Because he was the best’; ‘You don’t hear of no other people who do plays like him’; ‘When his plays came out, the first people who saw it thought it was really good, but it’s hard for us to understand it because times have changed’; ‘We’ve got to because of the exam; because the play is written in English’. These different answers are all, in fact, quite similar. To say that you have to study Shakespeare’s plays for the exam or because they are on the curriculum or simply because they’re in English is only to say, really, that you study Shakespeare’s plays because you’re told to. The students who say, before they’ve actually studied Shakespeare, that he is the best or that the first people who saw his plays thought them excellent also sound as if really they’re answering ‘because we’re told to’: they have been told that the plays are the best or were much appreciated by early audiences, so they have taken Shakespeare’s excellence for granted. John Yandell interviewed teachers, too. As one responded, when kids go “I hate Shakespeare” I can honestly say “I really understand that, I’m not telling you that it’s brilliant.” And sometimes they

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ask “Why have we got to study this?” and the personal side of me thinks “I haven’t got an answer for that – I had to, you have to” … it’s never very satisfactory. Several other teachers felt the same – ‘I had to, you have to’: it’s just a convention. The same question arises: why? There must be better reasons to study Shakespeare than because you have to. Certainly many critics and ­academics have tried to offer reasons but, as with many other issues in English, the study of Shakespeare – central to English courses – is the focus of a highly contentious debate, which has not yet filtered down to most students. Roughly speaking, there are two camps: on the one hand are those who might be called the traditionalists; on the other are a number of critics whom Jonathan Bate describes as the New Iconoclasts (an iconoclast is literally an ‘icon breaker’ and means a person who attacks established ideas). As you might expect, there is no neutral view on this; both camps have presuppositions that determine their opinions. Importantly, this very basic question – why do we have to study Shakespeare? – has parallels with many of the other controversies about Shakespeare, so it is central to understanding these too. The rest of this chapter sketches their arguments and then outlines what effect these have for doing English. Shakespeare the Star: The traditionalists’ argument Shakespeare’s friend Ben Jonson (1572–1637) wrote that Shakespeare is ‘not of an age, but for all time’: this might be the motto of the traditionalists’ argument for the study of Shakespeare. Simply, they argue, assert or assume that Shakespeare’s plays are the greatest literary texts, which makes the study of them invaluable. It is possible to break this argument down into three parts: ·· The artistic (or aesthetic) worth of Shakespeare’s plays • The values taught by Shakespeare’s plays ·· The universal appeal of Shakespeare’s work The traditionalists’ argument suggests that Shakespeare’s plays are unarguably the pinnacle of literary art. Desert Island Discs, a long-running radio programme on BBC Radio 4, hypothetically leaves its guests stranded on an abandoned island with eight records of their choice, a luxury item, the Bible, a book of their choice and – because it’s the best – the Complete Works of Shakespeare. A student guide called Studying Shakespeare, by Katherine

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Armstrong and Graham Arkin, asks ‘Why study Shakespeare?’ and then answers by saying ‘We need look no further than the opening exchange of Hamlet’. The authors offer a critical analysis of the passage and repeat the process with passages from the plays As You Like It and King Lear. This is as if to say, ‘If we just look at a passage of Shakespeare, its brilliance will convince us that Shakespeare is the best and so deserves more study than the work of other writers’. Traditionalists also argue that Shakespeare is the best teacher of values. In his book Representative Men (1850), the American poet and critic Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of Shakespeare: What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office, or function, or district of man’s work, has he not remembered? What king has he not taught state … ? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behavior? Shakespeare is seen as a font of wisdom and a source of truth about human behaviour, good and bad. For traditionalists, literature teaches values and ideals, and Shakespeare’s works are the most treasured form of literature. This means that to study Shakespeare is not just to study one man’s work but to study the human spirit at its finest. What is particularly interesting is that people with very different values find their own values reflected in Shakespeare. For example, in his book Shakespeare, the critic Kiernan Ryan describes how the plays ‘sharpen our need to forge a world from which division has been purged’. For him, Shakespeare’s plays are radical, suggesting that the divided established order needs to be shaken up and reformed. In contrast, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a right-wing group that monitors higher-educational curricula, argues that Shakespeare provides ‘a common frame of reference that helps unite us into a single community of discourse’ and so aims to keep society the way it is. For the businesspeople Norman Augustine and Ken Adelman, ‘the Bard’s profound insights into human nature’ mean that he is a useful business guru; unlike most contemporary plays or other artistic creations, The Merchant of Venice extols business and shows respect for corporate executives and

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admiration for commerce in general. Within its story are sharp examples needed by every businessperson who has asked, “When should I take a risk – and how best can I manage it?” These three examples focus on the ‘universal’ values the plays are said to present. This leads to the final part of the traditionalists’ view: if we assume that everybody is moved and affected by Shakespeare’s plays, Shakespeare embodies universal values and has something to say to all people at all times and in all places. Traditionalists often suggest that anybody seeing or reading the plays feels that Shakespeare is speaking to them and their innermost thoughts. In a lecture in 1985, the American poet, writer and activist Maya Angelou (1928–2015) described her love for Shakespeare. Growing up in poverty in the southern United States and experiencing American racism, she said that she felt Shakespeare spoke to her so completely that she knew ‘William Shakespeare was a black woman’. The traditionalists argue that Shakespeare’s works should be studied precisely because of this universal quality. They might be said to express the basic emotions, thoughts, ideas, hopes and fears of everybody in the world. For the traditionalists, Shakespeare’s plays are like stars – beautiful, remote, independent of the earth and worldly concerns, to be wondered at and admired. Yet, like medieval sailors navigating by the night sky, we are given direction by the stars. They give us core values, and by studying Shakespeare we learn those values. Others, though, come to a very different conclusion, with a different astronomical metaphor. Shakespeare the Black Hole: The cultural materialists’ argument Opposed to the traditionalist arguments are critics and thinkers who are sometimes described as cultural materialists. A cultural materialist critic is principally interested in the way material factors – like economic conditions and political struggles of all sorts – have influenced or even created a text. In turn, they argue that any text can tell us about these material conditions. Because their interest is in the context of works, they argue that all works of culture – here, Shakespeare’s plays – are involved with politics and the world. (This displays the extrinsic attitude discussed in Chapter 5, whereby critics look beyond the text to other non-literary ideas.) For a cultural materialist, Shakespeare – both the plays and the institution – is a construct of present-day political, cultural and economic interests rather than

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a transcendent spring of beauty, wisdom and values. Where traditionalists understand Shakespeare as a beautiful remote star, cultural materialists see his plays as trees, growing from the soil of political concerns in the world. They reject the ‘traditional’ claims made for Shakespeare’s plays. Is Shakespeare ‘simply the best’? To begin with, cultural materialists oppose the arguments about the intrinsic aesthetic worth and deny that Shakespeare is ‘simply the best’. In addition to suggesting that ‘the best’ in literature is not as straightforward as it seems – whose best? who decided? why? – cultural materialists have two arguments. First, they describe the development of Shakespeare’s reputation, showing that the idea of Shakespeare as the pinnacle of literary achievement is not the result of the quality ‘shining through’ but instead the result of specific historical events. Second, they compare Shakespeare’s reputation with the reputation of other writers to highlight the elements of historical chance. The story of how Shakespeare the Playwright became Shakespeare the Institution is a long one, and a number of easily available sources cover it in detail (see Further Reading). Roughly, it suggests that, although Shakespeare was successful during his career as a dramatist, he was not seen as the towering figure he is now. For example, Shakespeare was buried quietly in 1616; in contrast, when his friend and rival Ben Jonson died in 1637, a huge crowd followed the coffin to St. Paul’s Cathedral. Historians of Shakespeare’s reputation argue that its first boost came in 1660. From 1642 to 1660, during the Civil War and Commonwealth, theatres first in London, then throughout England, were closed because the country’s rulers – Oliver Cromwell (1599– 1658) and Parliament – considered plays immoral. In 1660, the theatres were reopened but, lacking any recent material, theatre owners and managers were forced to revive plays from the past, including Shakespeare, and a handful of editions of his plays were brought out for use in the theatre. However, as Gary Taylor points out in Reinventing Shakespeare, a very readable study of Shakespeare’s changing reputation, between 1660 and 1700 as many as 30 editions of plays by Shakespeare’s near contemporaries Beaumont and Fletcher were published. This seems to demonstrate that Shakespeare was not then pre-eminent playwright he is seen as today. Nevertheless, towards the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, Shakespeare’s reputation began to grow. As the market for books grew, so did editions of Shakespeare; there were editions in 1709, 1725, 1733, 1747, 1765 and 1768. In fact, it became quite the thing for somebody with

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literary ambitions to edit Shakespeare as a marker of their own importance and s­eriousness. Shakespeare was also extremely popular in Germany at this time. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the growth of the Romantic movement had helped to foster Shakespeare’s reputation. Romantics considered ‘creative force’ to be vitally important, and they saw Shakespeare as a great instance of creativity. His work was read more widely, and the characters of his plays began to take on a life of their own. As Henry Crawford, a character in Jane Austen’s (1775–1817) Mansfield Park (1814), says: ‘Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is part of an Englishman’s constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere, one is intimate with him by instinct.’ Echoing T. S. Eliot (see Chapter 5), it seems that for Austen’s Crawford, Shakespeare is in an Englishman’s bones. Throughout the nineteenth century, the idea that Shakespeare was the central figure of the literary canon began to grow. Because his work was seen as a model of English values, the expansion and consolidation of the British Empire took Shakespeare’s reputation with it and, as Chapter 2 suggested, used Shakespeare to its own ends. His texts were taken to be the touchstones of ‘Englishness’. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Shakespeare had become an icon. In 1910, the British poet Swinburne (1837–1909) wrote that the word Shakespeare connotes more than any other man’s name that ever was written or spoken on the earth ... It is not only the crowning glory of England, it is the crowning glory of mankind, that such a man should ever have been born as William Shakespeare. The use of Shakespeare for patriotic propaganda during the two world wars set the final seal on his reputation as the greatest English writer. Shakespeare’s reputation has been caught up in a snowball effect. As ‘everyone’ seems to agree that Shakespeare has the highest prestige, people try to associate themselves with the institution of Shakespeare as a sign of their own value. For example, if aspiring theatre directors want to show off their talent, they take on the ‘hardest’ challenge of the ‘greatest’ plays: Shakespeare. Actors often say they knew they had made it when they played their first Shakespeare role. Films and TV shows use Shakespeare to sound serious, and series like Breaking Bad, The Wire, Game of Thrones or The Crown are compared to Shakespeare’s work. Film studios make Shakespeare-like films to prove their artistic credentials or adapt them to show their relevance.

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And if such people keep demonstrating that they see Shakespeare as the best, others will keep believing it. However, looking more closely at this history of Shakespeare’s reputation, the cultural materialists argue that the assumption of Shakespeare’s greatness relies not simply on the quality of his work but also on historical chance, and you can compare his reputation to that of other writers. A number of authors could be considered just as great as Shakespeare, but, lacking the support of an empire and all the cultural power of England and the English over 400 years, they simply don’t have the same reputation. The Athenian playwright Sophocles (c. 496–c. 406 bce) had a major influence on the genre of tragedy, but only seven of the 120 or so of his plays survive. The prolific Spanish writer Lope de Vega (1562–1635) was a contemporary of Shakespeare, wrote many more plays than Shakespeare, wrote for a similar sort of audience and was very popular. Jonathan Bate takes up this case in The Genius of Shakespeare, pointing out that ‘Spain went into decline and Lope was not translated. The whole of Shakespeare has been translated into a score of languages; less than ten per cent of Lope de Vega’s surviving plays have ever been translated into English’. According to Bate, the weakening of Spain as a world power led to the failure of Lope de Vega to survive as a ‘great world writer’. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) has an interesting view on this: [While] I hear expressions of admiration for Shakespeare made by the distinguished men of several centuries, I can never rid myself of a suspicion that praising him has been a matter of convention, even though I have to tell myself that this is not the case. He goes on to say that ‘an enormous amount of praise has been and still is lavished on Shakespeare without understanding and for specious reasons by a thousand professors of literature’. Later, he notes that I am deeply suspicious of most of Shakespeare’s admirers. I think the trouble is that, in western culture, he stands alone and so, one can only place him by placing him wrongly. That is, it is because Shakespeare is taken to be great that his work can’t be properly located, defined or pinned down. Shakespeare is great, perhaps, despite his admirers rather than because of them.

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Does Shakespeare teach values? The second traditionalist claim I discussed was that Shakespeare’s plays transmit universal values (‘not for an age, but for all time’). In contrast, cultural materialists suggest that that the time and place in which works were written and are being read are vitally important. A great work isn’t ‘neutrally’ great but has been acclaimed as great for certain reasons. A cultural materialist might ask, suspiciously, why any particular judgement was made at any particular time or why that play was popular at that historical moment. One example of this is the popularity of Henry V. Interpreted as a patriotic play celebrating British victories abroad in adversity, it was (unsurprisingly) very popular during the Second World War. Similarly, during the Second World War, theatre director Maurice Evans (1901–1989) put on a version of Hamlet in New York that aimed to show Hamlet as a character ‘in whom every G. I. [American soldier] would see himself reflected – a man compelled to champion his conception of right in a world threatened by a domination of evil’. ‘Action’, Evans wrote, ‘would be the keynote of our production’, and each soldier was in his own way a Hamlet, bewildered by the uninvited circumstances in which he found himself and groping for the moral justification and the physical courage demanded of him. If we could succeed in making the parallel of Hamlet’s perplexities apparent, the significance of the play to our audience would be magnified. This version, which came to be known as the G. I. Hamlet, was a huge success, played on Broadway and toured across the country. Whereas a traditionalist might argue that Shakespeare speaks to everyone, a cultural materialist – or a theatre director, perhaps – argues that context, class, ethnicity, gender, age, education and so on make a great deal of difference. No text can speak in the same way to everybody; some people might even say the text doesn’t speak to them at all. For a cultural materialist, it is no surprise that people on both the right and the left can find their values reflected in Shakespeare. They argue that there is no one ‘right’ meaning in Shakespeare; we each read into the plays what we will, depending on our worldviews. What is interesting to the cultural materialists, if there is no essential meaning or universal value to be sought, is the way in which Shakespeare’s plays are used: plays can be used to transmit views as well as to reflect them. In his very accessible and witty books

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That Shakespeherian Rag and Meaning by Shakespeare, Terence Hawkes (1932–2014), a leading figure in this movement, argued that there is no ‘real’ Shakespeare and that his plays are not ‘the repository, guarantee and chief distributor next to God of unchanging truths’. ‘Shakespeare’ is only the name for a cultural tool to convince people of a series of ideas. As an institution, Shakespeare has a great deal of authority; if someone wishes to persuade you of an idea, calling on Shakespeare as evidence seems to give that idea more strength. Even more interesting is Hawkes’ idea that the institutionalisation of Shakespeare turns the plays into ciphers. In Reinventing Shakespeare, Gary Taylor compares Shakespeare to a black hole: Shakespeare himself no longer transmits visible light: his stellar energies have been trapped within the gravity well of this own reputation. We find in Shakespeare only what we bring to him or what others have left behind; he gives us back our own values. For Taylor, all the work done on Shakespeare by academics, teachers, critics, students, theatre directors, actors, filmmakers and so on has obliterated Shakespeare, and what is left is merely a reflection of their own values. Sometimes it seems that Shakespeare is so much part of our society that we don’t even need to read his plays: you can see a film of Romeo and Juliet, and it will give you an idea of what it’s about. You may feel you know the play, but in fact you have seen someone’s interpretation of the text, with issues emphasised by the director because those were important to her or him. If this is the case, you are learning more about the director’s values than you are about Shakespeare’s play. And if you then read the original text, it may well be harder to interpret it another way, once you have certain ideas – presuppositions – in your mind. There is so much talk about Shakespeare, and so many ideas about the plays crop up in everyday life, that it is perhaps impossible to think about the text itself rather than what people have said about it. One important example of this is the way in which Shakespeare – the Institution – is used as a national symbol. Praise has been heaped on Shakespeare for describing the ‘English’ spirit (paradoxically, this usually occurs at the same time as praising him for being ‘universal’). The Royal Shakespeare Company is identified with the monarch, the Head of State, and so with the rest of the United Kingdom. A speech from Richard II (Act II, scene i), where England is described as

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This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise is regularly taken completely out of its context and used, with swelling music, in advertisements and in party political broadcasts to help raise a patriotic fervour. Admiring Shakespeare creates a ‘we’, a sense of shared identity, and to dislike Shakespeare is seen almost as a declaration that you are not ‘one of us’ and not ‘patriotic’. Teaching Shakespeare as ‘the national poet’ conveys (somebody’s) idea of ‘Englishness’. You might also notice that lots of guides to Shakespeare use ‘we’ throughout – ‘through studying Shakespeare we learn’, for example, or ‘we need look no further’. This seems innocent enough, but any ‘we’ (‘us here’) needs a ‘they’ (‘them over there’) in order to define itself; Shakespeare is used as a key tool of that definition. It may be wise to wonder about who this ‘we’ – teachers, students, academics, the government – actually is and what other ideas this ‘we’ might be passing on to you. This is not to say that the ‘we’ has always to be elitist. Indeed, in The Genius of Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate argues that Shakespeare has been used as a subversive anti-elitist force. As an example, he cites a version of The Tempest by the Martinique-born writer Aimé Césaire (b. 1913). In this version, from 1968, the play is retold from the point of view of the slave Caliban. The ‘wise old man’, Prospero, is seen as a totalitarian slave owner. Shakespeare here is being used to oppose racism and highlight Europe’s slave-owning past. Another case of Shakespeare reflecting values is the link made between class, education and Shakespeare. For example, David Hornbrook writes that, for most people, Shakespeare ‘is inescapably associated with social snobbery’. Students (especially in school) who enjoy Shakespeare are usually the ‘academic’ ones, the ‘literary A stream’. As this is usually a minority of students, Shakespeare is thus seen as elitist. The central role of Shakespeare in the examination system and its links with success and rewards in education lead to an understanding that Shakespeare divides the good from the bad. Knowing about Shakespeare is a badge of admission into a certain group and, again, admiring Shakespeare creates a ‘we’, a sense of shared identity; to dislike Shakespeare is seen almost as a declaration that you are not ‘one of us’. Oddly, this means that Shakespeare is not so easy for populist politicians to appropriate because his work can seem elitist (though as the example above suggests, it needn’t be). It is because the institution of Shakespeare divides as much as it unifies that Fay Weldon’s image of Shakespeare as a castle is

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so apt; a castle means security for those living within, but it is imposing and even threatening to those outside. Does Shakespeare have a universal appeal? Cultural materialists also question the traditionalists’ third supposition: that Shakespeare has universal appeal. Does everybody even understand Shakespeare the first time they read him, let alone have a strong response? There are, as might be expected, formidable resources for helping to teach Shakespeare’s plays at college or secondary school: notes, websites, films and so on. The paradox is, of course, that if Shakespeare did speak to everybody, immediately, all these efforts to make his work seem accessible and exciting simply wouldn’t be necessary in order to make his work seem universal. This is not to say that everything you study should come easily – it shouldn’t; becoming attuned to literary works can be hard – but that it’s not always so clear whether it is made to seem universal or it actually might be universal. For the cultural materialists, then, it is impossible to get to a ‘real’ Shakespeare. Moreover, Shakespeare the institution is never innocent or neutral. More than any other name – more than any other series of literary texts – Shakespeare is used. The effects of this debate on studying Shakespeare These academic arguments about Shakespeare’s reputation and the way in which the plays are understood have direct effects on the way you study Shakespeare. A more traditionalist view suggests that you might simply look at plot, character and themes (as any study guide will show). The plot is studied because it is the easiest to understand. The characters are studied because it is assumed that Shakespeare still ‘speaks’ to us through the characters. And the themes are studied not just because doing English has traditionally concentrated on finding the ‘message’ in a text but also because the themes of Shakespeare are ‘universal’ and so reveal ‘universal values’. However, the cultural materialist viewpoint brings with it a whole range of fascinating new questions you could use to approach Shakespeare. Some of these questions might focus on how Shakespeare’s plays are used. Why do productions of his plays differ? What lies behind the differences in film versions of the plays? Others might explore the cultural power of Shakespeare. Why are quotations from Shakespeare found throughout the national press?

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Why do so many novels, from all genres, use Shakespearean quotations as titles? Other questions might focus on the editions themselves. Should editors modernise the spelling of the plays or leave it in the original? What is at stake in this choice? Why do teachers tell you to read one edition rather than another? In relation to the plays themselves, there is an even wider range of questions. In a book for teachers by Susan Leach called Shakespeare in the Classroom, the author suggests the following examples: ·· • • • •

Who holds the power in the play? What is the economic basis of the play? Is the power held/obeyed/challenged/overthrown? What is the framework within which the plays operate? Is it possible to make easy judgements about the behaviours of any character? • How does gender work in the play? ·· How are women presented? These questions, which don’t take the greatness of Shakespeare or the universal values of his plays for granted, move a long way from the familiar trinity of plot/character/themes. Traditionalists and iconoclasts in other debates I suggested that approaches to the very basic question of ‘Why study Shakespeare?’ had parallels in other controversies about Shakespeare. One example of this has been recent scholarship on Shakespeare and his collaborators. If one thought that Shakespeare was a transcendent genius, it might be hard to stomach that not all of ‘Shakespeare’ is by ‘Shakespeare’; yet, in part as a result of the questions cultural materialists have asked, most Shakespeare scholars now agree that – like all playwrights of the period – Shakespeare worked in collaboration with others to produce some of his works. Some well-established plays seem to have been collaborative: All’s Well That Ends Well, Pericles and Measure for Measure, as well as some lost plays (like Cardenio and Henry VIII). And some plays not ‘by Shakespeare’ seem to have scenes by him in them (such Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Anthony Munday’s Sir Thomas More). Another example concerns discussions about adaptations of Shakespeare, again between ‘tradition’ and ‘iconoclasm’. Ayanna Thompson’s book

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Passing Strange analyses the issue of Shakespeare and race. She ­identifies a tension between more traditional views of Shakespeare that seek to ‘reform and unify’ the population and more iconoclastic ones that seek to use Shakespeare to highlight precisely what is disunified and fissiparous in society. For Thompson, there is no ‘raw’ or ‘real’ Shakespeare – all versions of his plays are just that: versions. While much of the rhetoric about teaching and performing Shakespeare in schools and prisons, for example, praises the ‘authenticity and authority’ of Shakespeare as universal, Thompson does not find these qualities in the productions that reflect a fantasy about Elizabethan and Jacobean England or ideas about timeless values; instead, she finds them in companies that reflect local and specific issues. A similar argument, too, exists over the ways in which, more generally, people think about ‘global’ adaptations of Shakespeare. For some people, the plays exist to be cherished, and productions of them must have some degree of fidelity to the idea of the text; for others, the plays are just the starting point. They exist to be performed, acted, changed, as one might change a recipe or improvise a piece of music around a tune. Any performance of Shakespeare is an adaptation of the play text, and some – for example, comic Hollywood films or productions set in China – go much further in improvising or challenging the text than others; indeed, you might well ask when a Shakespeare play stops being a Shakespeare play. (Of course, there is no right answer to these questions, but exploring them tells us more about Shakespeare, about ourselves and about others). Similar questions exist over the ‘No Fear Shakespeare’ texts, which puts ‘Shakespeare’s language side-by-side with a facing-page translation into modern English – the kind of English people actually speak today’. For some, it is partially the beautiful, clever, ambiguous, shapely language that is central to Shakespeare, and to lose this is to lose the whole, and, if it’s hard, then it’s worth the effort; for others, creating an access to the text, or an aspect of it, is worth this risk (what do you think?). Yet another version of this debate appears in a current controversy between two different groups of scholars. On the one hand are the New Historicists, who are keen to put Shakespeare’s plays into their historical context in order to understand them as works from the past. ‘Dramatists are best understood in relation to their time’, writes James Shapiro, author of 1599, a detailed study of one momentous year of Shakespeare’s life. Perhaps the most famous current exponent of this is the critic Stephen Greenblatt, who invented the term new historicism. He not only writes beautifully but he also consistently places Shakespeare’s works into the complexities of his time and finds Shakespeare’s greatness interwoven into his context. On the

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other hand are those who call themselves presentists; presentism is used by historians to condemn people for seeing things only from the present perspective, without the correct historical context. In some ways, this is a foolish accusation because we can see only see the past from our current perspective (so all forms of history or context setting are somehow presentist). So in contrast, rather than thinking of the present as an obstacle to be avoided in our understanding of Shakespeare, presentists think of it as a factor actively to be sought out and something to which we should pay close attention. This sort of approach not only recognises the artistic power of Shakespeare’s plays but also, as Ewan Fernie argues, that the plays require us to be ‘responsible’, that is, to respond to them. In part, this can mean that, for example, the antiSemitism of The Merchant of Venice is not simply a historical curiosity but has to be faced; in part, it can mean that questions about power and politics posed in Julius Caesar still have to be examined. Conclusion Our views on Shakespeare are still changing in other ways, too, even 400 years after his death. For example, since the 1970s, it has been usual to think about Shakespeare plays as works of literature to be performed (they are plays, after all, meant to be seen and heard rather than read like novels). However, many of the plays are in fact too long to be easily performed. Recently, one scholar, Lucas Erne, using historical sources, suggested that the chief reasons why Shakespeare wrote excessively long plays from the point of view of the public stage is that his economically secure position as a shareholder in his company allowed him to do so, that he cared for a readership of his playbooks [the texts of his plays] and – given his success as print author – he knew there would be one. That is, Shakespeare was like a filmmaker who edits one version of a film down for the cinema and produces another, much longer one, for the lucrative DVD release, with ‘restored’ scenes, special features and so on. If the versions of the plays we have, then, were meant to be read as much as performed, this changes our view of Shakespeare’s works (and caused a riot among Shakespeare experts). And even the number of his plays has changed; in 2011, a version of one of Shakespeare’s lost plays, Cardenio, written in 1613 with Fletcher, was performed. Emma Smith explains that the source material is known (Don Quixote, the great Spanish novel by Miguel de

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Cervantes [1547–1616]), that there was an adaption in 1727 (called Double Falsehood) and that some of the music of the play has recently been identified; this allowed for a ‘reconstruction’ – to some degree – of the text of the play. Exploring these debates over Shakespeare shows that thinking about what we read, like thinking about how we read, leads to all sorts of questions about how we see the world. Asking ‘Why study Shakespeare?’ leads directly to questions about the relationship between art and politics or between literature and history, and it is interwoven with important issues like gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity and national identity. Despite being opposed to the traditionalist view, the cultural materialist approach doesn’t necessarily argue that Shakespeare isn’t worth studying or that all artistic values are relative, but it does insist that it’s worth questioning assumptions about the author and the plays. However, it is vital not just to assume Shakespeare’s greatness but also to think about how we construct it – not just the plays but how we look at the plays. Castle Shakespeare may be full of tourists, but it is still a site of conflict. Summary ·· Shakespeare has become an institution, not only in literature but also in cultural life. It’s almost impossible to avoid the institution of Shakespeare. ·· Traditionalists argue that Shakespeare should be studied because of the aesthetic worth of his work, because he communicates values shared by everyone and because he has universal appeal. ·· Cultural materialists are more interested in the way the institution of Shakespeare is related to politics and history. They argue that he is considered the best through historical chance, that the values we see in Shakespeare depend upon our own ideas or those of others who ‘use’ the institution and that the plays do not speak to everyone. Cultural materialists argue that Shakespeare is the name for a key cultural tool used to convince people of a series of ideas. ·· Whichever approach you agree with, the debate shows the importance of thinking about how and why you study Shakespeare’s work.

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part III

Reading, writing and meaning

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8 The author is dead?

·· ·· ·· ·· ·· ··

Who decides what a text means, the author or the reader? What is the traditional view of the author, the meaning and the text? What are the problems with this view? How else can we determine the meaning of the text? Why has the author always seemed so important? What are the consequences of all of this?

Having looked at how we read and what we read, I’m going to move on to other debates in English that centre on questions of literature, meaning and how we see the world. This chapter is about the relationship between texts and meaning, between authors and readers. How important is the author in deciding what a work of literature means? At first, this might look like a silly question: after all, the writer wrote the text and must have meant something by it. However, for literary critics, this question has been the focus of one of the most heated debates of the last 70 years. Very roughly, the debate has two sides: those who believe that authorial intention – or what the author ‘meant’ – is central to working out

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the meaning of a text; and those who believe that the author’s intention does not ­determine what a text means and that any understanding depends on the individual reader’s interpretation. Perhaps the most influential figures on this second side of the debate were the critic William Wimsatt (1907–1975) and the philosopher Monroe Beardsley (1915–1985), who wrote an extraordinarily influential article called ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ in the mid-1940s. The argument was given a further (and more melodramatic) twist by the French writer and critic Roland Barthes (1915–1980), who wrote a piece announcing ‘The Death of the Author’. While the whole discussion is more formally known as the debate over the intentional fallacy or over authorial intention, it is often referred to as the author is dead debate, in an echo of Barthes’s title. For authorial intention: The authority of the author An A-level examiner’s report from the 1990s: The Examiners are unanimously of the opinion that the proper interpretation of a first person pronoun in a piece of writing is to take that individual to be the writer unless there is internal evidence to the contrary. This is the only logical course to take. Teachers who urge upon their students the term ‘persona’ or invite them to use ‘safe’ phrases such as ‘the speaker in the poem’ cause their hapless candidates enormous trouble. For these examiners, and for many people teaching and studying literature, it is ‘common sense’ that when a poem is written in the first person, ‘I’, then that ‘I’ is the author. They are claiming that any other approach is illogical and causes confusion. It is even more ‘common sense’ that what the text means is what its author intended it to mean. However, ‘common sense’ is often the pretext for taking an idea for granted, and if the aim of studying literature is to think about how we read, then it is exactly these sort of presuppositions that should be questioned. In everyday speech, in common sense, when you say, ‘The bus stop is on the lef’, you mean, after all, that the bus stop is on the left. But literary texts are not ordinary speech (even if, at first sight, they look like ordinary speech), and so ordinary common sense might not be working properly here either. What, then, are the ideas wrapped up in this so-called common-sense attitude? Those who share this attitude believe that the text means what the author intended it to mean and nothing else. The text itself, they imply, is like a

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the Text The Author

puts ideas into...

which is decoded by…

the Reader

Figure 8.1  The traditional approach

code, in which the author has hidden or encrypted her or his meaning. In reading, the reader decodes the language of the text to find the ideas that the writer has hidden within. A diagram to express this might look like Figure 8.1. This seemingly simple idea – that reading a poem or a novel, seeing a play, is just decoding what the author intended – implies at least four presuppositions that have profound consequences for the study of English. 1. Meaning If a text is understood as the encoding of the author’s intention, it leads to the assumption that the text has one definite meaning, just as a code has a definite meaning. Once having cracked the secret code, the reader has explained the text and solved the riddle; the reader can give a final and accurate account of meaning, and there is nothing more to say. This is a version of the ‘hidden meaning’ or ‘right answer’ idea from Chapter 4. However, works of literature often have ambiguous phrasing and seem to offer two (or many more!) meanings. Then, people who argue this point of view suggest that the author intended to be ambiguous and meant both things at once (with the implication that she or he was very clever to be able to do that). In general, this assumption leads to essay and exam questions like, ‘How does Shakespeare convey the strengths and weaknesses of Othello’s character?’ If the reader sees Othello as both courageous and credulous, it is because Shakespeare intended it to be so. The assumption also leads to some interpretations of texts being described as wrong because they are not considered to be what the author intended.

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2. Biographical evidence If you accept that what the author intended is what the text means, it seems possible that you could understand a text without even reading it. Imagine finding some evidence – a letter from the author to a friend, for example – that says, ‘I mean my novel to be about the conflict between good and evil’. Then you could say, ‘This novel is about good and evil. I know this because the author said so!’ It would be like seeing the original message before it was put into code. This sort of interpretation, autobiographical criticism, uses the writer’s life story, through letters, diaries and so on, to explain the text. But, oddly, this sort of critic need not actually read the text they are discussing (as they already claim to have ‘the answer’) and so miss out the very point of doing English, the creation of knowledge through interpretation. 3. Authorial presence All these assumptions rely on the idea that the author is, in some strange way, present in the text, actually there. Through reading the text, you are in direct communication with the author. This assumption leads to questions like, ‘In Paradise Lost Book 1, does Milton convince you that Satan is both attractive and corrupt?’ This ghostly presence of the author is the final ‘authority’ that can decide what the text means. 4. Simple evaluation Once it is known what the author intended and so what the text means, it is possible to judge the text by how well the author achieved what she or he set out to do. This assumes that judging a work of literature is like judging someone’s cooking: if you know someone intended to make chocolate biscuits, you can judge them poor, OK or delicious. If you know what an author intended to do, you can ask questions like, ‘How successfully does Jane Austen show the growth of her female characters?’ While many forms of interpretation rely upon this idea of authorial intention, and it might appear to be common sense, it has been criticised for a range of reasons. Against authorial intention: The death of the author Throughout this book, I have argued that texts are always interpreted. The idea that, by uncovering the authorial intention, it is possible to find out the

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‘true meaning’ or the ‘right answer’ runs directly against this. The idea of interpretation (and its often ignored complexities) underlies all the major objections to authorial intention. 1. Meaning: Is literature a code? Is literature simply a code? Certainly, this is the impression given to many students: that a work of literature is about something – the theme – and that the job of the student is to discover what this theme might be, to find the ‘hidden meaning’. So is this really the case? I would argue absolutely not for (at least) two reasons. First, the idea is self-contradictory. If literary texts were simply codes, then, paradoxically, literature wouldn’t need to exist. Wouldn’t it be much simpler to convey a message in a straightforward way rather than turn it into a work of fiction? Why write a novel to say ‘war is evil’ when you could just say it, or go to a demonstration, or form a political party, or lobby (or even become) your own representative in government? Of course, there are texts with polemical messages, but when you respond to the message – for example, ‘hate is wrong’ – it’s the message or the argument you are responding to, not the work of literature itself. But there is a more important reason why literature is not simply a code to be worked out. A code works like this: two (or more) people share a cipher where, for example, the letter ‘A’ is represented by the number ‘1’ and so on. One encodes, using the cipher; and the other decodes, using the same cipher. Thinking back to Figure 3.3 (p. 31), this cipher represents the same way of looking at a text, so both parties are agreed that 16, 15, 16, 16, 25 is a name in code and not just collections of numbers. But, as I have argued, part of the point of literature is that it encourages different ways of looking at texts, creating different results. So, in fact, reading cannot mean decoding the secret message, because there is no shared cipher, no one set of presuppositions we all share. Could you really see a text in the same way as a nineteenth-century author? Or even how your class mates view it? In having many different ways of looking, we have many different ciphers leading to many different ‘meanings’. 2. Biographical evidence This is also very much open to question. First, reading a letter or diary is not the same as interpreting a poem or novel. It would be interesting to find out

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what a text meant to its author, but that is not the same thing as thinking about what it means to you. Wimsatt and Beardsley, in their essay ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (1946), put it like this: In the spirit of a man who would settle a bet, the critic writes to [the poet] Eliot and asks what he meant [in his poem “Prufrock”] … [O]ur point is that such an answer to such an inquiry would have nothing to do with the poem “Prufrock”; it would not be a critical inquiry. Critical inquiries, unlike bets, are not settled in this way. Critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the Oracle. Reading a text, interpreting a text, is not an activity that has a right or wrong answer. It is not like making a bet or solving a maths problem. Unlike textbooks in maths and the sciences, there are no answers in the back of your teacher’s copies of the novels and plays you might read in class. You have to come to your own, informed judgement. Second, whatever the ‘oracle’ author said is itself another text that is open to interpretation. A letter saying ‘I intended such and such’ is not firm evidence. Not only could it be a lie, plain and simple, but it is also open to interpretation because it is written within a certain historical period, where certain ideas were dominant; and because we, perhaps centuries later, may know things that the author didn’t (and clearly vice versa). Authors might have very astute things to say about their own work, but what they say is only as valid as what another reader might say in determining the meaning of a text. Interpreting their work, authors are doing the same job as anybody else looking at a text. Another way of thinking about this is to ask, ‘Who owns words?’ Wimsatt and Beardsley, discussing poetry, say that a text ‘is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it’. They argue that authors might shape language, but that ultimately it is public property and readers may make of it what they will. This is not a modern idea: at the end of his long poem Troilus and Criseyde, Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343/4–1400) wrote ‘go little book, go’. He knew that, once created, the poem was out of his hands, and people were free to interpret it in any way they wished. If an author’s comments about intention are not authoritative, biographies are even less useful, being, after all, only an interpretation of somebody’s life. It will certainly inform the reader about the author and her or his period, but it will not provide a ‘correct interpretation’ for a literary text.

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3. Authorial presence Authorial presence is perhaps the most difficult assumption to understand. The question ‘In Paradise Lost Book 1, does Milton convince you that Satan is both attractive and corrupt?’ and others like it are, in a way, very confused. For they conjure up the rather worrying image of Milton appearing to you and arguing passionately that Paradise Lost Book 1 shows Satan as both attractive and corrupt. But surely, it is the text of Paradise Lost Book 1 and how you read it that would convince you (or not), rather than Milton himself ? A text does not magically bring the author into the room with you – writing is just marks on paper. More than that, the very presence of the writing shows up the absence of the author. If the author were actually there, she or he could simply talk to you; the written text itself implies their absence, like an empty chair at a celebratory meal. (Look in this book, and others, at all the moments where the text says ‘As I have discussed…’ or ‘I said earlier…’ In fact, none of these things are actually discussed or said at all; they are written down. Using the sorts of words that imply real speech is a way of suggesting that the author is actually there, present and talking to you. But this is metaphorical, not real. While you read this, I’m off somewhere else!) Some critics argue that the author speaks through the text, but how could you tell when this was happening? In many novels or plays, several points of view are presented, for example, through different characters. Which point of view is the author’s? And even if there are passages written in the first person, ‘I’, how do we know if this is the author? It is with such questions that Barthes’s essay ‘The Death of the Author’ begins. He finds part of a novel where it just isn’t clear who is speaking. Is it the author’s voice? The voice of a role the author is playing (as the narrator, or as ‘the spirit of the age’)? Is it always clear who or what is speaking? Is the author wearing a mask? Or, suddenly, does the ‘real’ author appear? His point is that if you are looking for the ‘authentic’ authorial meaning through a moment where the author ‘speaks’, it is, in fact, very hard indeed to pin down for certain where on the page that moment is. If writers are absent, how could we ever come to grips with the authorial intention? We can’t ask them, and we can’t even find out if there is a part of the text that was written to tell us ‘what they really meant’. With the person irrecoverable, it seems foolish to try to work out his or her intention. Instead, perhaps, we should make what we can of the text.

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4. Simple evaluation Apart from the question of what you are to evaluate, if you cannot trace authorial intention, how should you evaluate? Who sets the standards? Does the question, ‘How successfully does Jane Austen show the growth of her female characters?’ mean there is some fixed model of how successfully the growth of female characters should be shown? Or could you compare Jane Austen to another novelist of the period, Frances Burney (1752–1840), and judge who was better? The idea of judgement implies an objective neutrality that nobody could have and demands that everybody thinks in the same way. Even though it used to be thought that the job of the critic was to judge what great works were and who the great writers were, it is clear that judging a writer’s ‘success’ is more a result of the way the discipline has developed than a useful task in itself. With these new ideas in mind, we could redraw the traditional diagram of the relationship between text and meaning as shown in Figure 8.2. Authors, in saying what they meant by their work, can be seen as other readers, with an interpretation only as valid as that of any other person looking

After ‘the death of the author’, texts are open to interpretations

Reader 1

Interpreted by …

Text

Reader 2

Author

Figure 8.2  After the death of the author

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at the text. The author is no longer the all-important figure: The Author, as the saying goes, is Dead. You can see, too, how these two approaches can correspond, roughly, to the intrinsic and extrinsic attitudes I discussed in Chapter 5. The first focuses more on the text itself, the second on the figure of the author. So why has the author always seemed so important? Those who claim that the author is dead also look at how the figure of the author was ‘born’, claiming this as another argument against authorial intention. The author and the importance of the role of the author in culture was, like all ideas, invented. Of course, with broad concepts and categories of this sort, it is impossible to say exactly when it was invented, but it has been argued very convincingly that this idea of the author came into being in or around the eighteenth century. This is obviously not to say that people didn’t write before this time but rather that their sense of identity as an author and their relation to their texts were different. Mass printing in England began after William Caxton (c. 1415/24–c. 1491/2) introduced the first printing press in 1466 or 1467. Before this, many medieval stories and romances, like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, were without named authors (Chaucer is an exception), and who the authors were did not seem to matter so much. (In contrast, if present-day writers stay anonymous, it is precisely because it does matter who they are; they might want to escape persecution, or paying taxes, or scandal, for example.) The concept of the author as the ‘true source’ of meaning perhaps developed most fully during the eighteenth century: the period of the Industrial Revolution. During this time of massive social and cultural change, writing became property, something that could be sold. It was possible to have a career as an author without having a patron, living by selling what one wrote. Since ‘ownership’ of the words was important to generate income, the importance of attribution grew. If you find yourself at an airport bookstore, picking up something to read to pass the time on a long flight, you will probably look for a new book by a favourite mystery or science fiction or romance author. The name of this or that author (Stephen King, Agatha Christie, Danielle Steel) functions like a brand, just as it would on a can of beans at the supermarket. (Thriller writer Tom Clancy did in fact just use his name to brand books he hadn’t written: ‘Tom Clancy’s Op-Center’). Celebrities in other fields do this all the time: ghost writers turn out the book, the celebrity’s name goes on the front. Conversely, rather bravely, J. K. Rowling wrote her first detective story under the name ‘Robert Galbraith’ to escape the ‘Potter-author’ brand.

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Another major influence that helped to foster the idea of the author as the true source of meaning was the Romantic Movement – a loose collection of poets, thinkers and philosophers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They focused on the created idea of the writer as genius, which didn’t just mean ‘very intelligent’ as it does today. A genius was a person whose immense creative and artistic power was a conduit between unseen powers (of Nature, for example, or the Imagination) and the world of human beings. Not only did this focus attention on the ‘author’, the genius, but it also became important to know who had this special ability and who didn’t. The Romantic concept of the author also stressed that an author must be original. However, some people have cast doubt on the very possibility of originality. Whatever original ideas authors might be trying to convey, they have only a limited number of pre-existing counters – words – to use to do this, just as an artist has only a certain range of colours to paint with. Even new colours are only mixtures of old ones, and although the range of colours is wide – the visible spectrum – it is also limited (try imaging a totally different colour that no one has ever seen before). Like colours, none of the words authors might choose are new; words are the only system of meaning that they can use. If authors want to explain what original idea they ‘mean’, they can use only words that have pre-existing meanings, so the words will already have shaped what the author can say. (This view reverses the normal assumption that an author shapes language; it suggests that, in fact, language shapes authors.) On top of this, much literature is bound by generic conventions, so any work has, to some extent, to fit an already established pattern. In a thriller, for example, the murderer can either be captured or escape. In a way, this doesn’t leave much room for originality. These rules can be challenged and changed, of course, but this too relies on the rules inasmuch as rebellion has to involve rebelling against something. These conventions are not part of the original intention of the author; the ‘original’ ideas are reshaped by traditions of writing. So the ‘author’ is yet another invented category, and even the way this category is defined, as a person who communicates original ideas, is open to question. But what are the effects of this? Consequences of the death of the author If the author is dead, and reading to discover her or his secret hidden intention is no longer the only logical course to take, there are new questions to ask. Perhaps one of the most important is how to understand the significance of the author today. The author might no longer be the source of meaning in a text, but

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this doesn’t mean that the term has become irrelevant. Knowing about an author does still tell us some things about a text: the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1926–1984) coined the term author-function to describe the way the idea of the author is used. For example, an author’s name serves as a classification because you can be fairly sure what sort of text, broadly understood in terms of style and period, you will find under the brand Agatha Christie or Stephen King. This is not to pre-empt the idea of meaning but to suggest that the name is used to group certain texts together. The author-function is also used, correctly or incorrectly, to ascribe value to texts. When, every now and again, somebody claims to have discovered a new Shakespeare poem, there is more fuss than when a new poem by a less famous poet is discovered. Again, if you like the work of a certain novelist, you might buy another novel by the same writer. The author’s name also becomes a reference tag for other, often quite vague things like style or themes: critics discuss ‘Aphra Behn’s style’ (1640–1689; British playwright, novelist and translator) or ‘Samuel Beckett’s philosophy’ (1906–1989; Irish writer). Sometimes the names of authors are used as the tags for a whole series of ‘big ideas’ – Darwinism or Marxism, for example. These ideas may have little (or even nothing) to do with those individuals in history, but the ideas still come under the classification of their name, so powerful is the author-function. In none of these cases is the author necessarily a source of authority on the meaning of the text. Creative writing as a subject might also seem to ‘bring back’ the author, and in some sense, it does, because authors can be asked to explore their own work and explain their choices. However, as people work through the intricacies of writing, making choices about words or forms (a sonnet or a free-verse poem? a novel or a short story?) or points of view (an all-knowing narrator? or a first-person narrator who is part of the story?), the idea that a single author controls the text that she or he writes seems more complicated as the language and genre itself start to shape the writing. The choices made in the writing – choices about the form of the text – seem to dictate how the writing proceeds and makes the author less and less powerful. And, of course, authors, when faced with their own texts, are readers too, making interpretations of the things they have written. This has a corollary, too, in the publicity given to contemporary authors: interviews, lecture tours, public readings. Of course, we are interested in authors as we are interested in all celebrities, but it seems odd because what we should be interested in is their work. It can sometimes seem as if we turn to authors precisely to give us the secret key to their work – an authoritative interpretation – that would save us actually reading the poems or novel.

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Most importantly, the death of the author – or at least of the author’s authority – leads to what Roland Barthes called ‘the birth of the reader’. I understand this to mean that a literary work does have a meaning, but it isn’t a puzzle or a secret to be found out, placed there in code by a genius author. Instead, it’s something that grows as an interaction between the readers and the text itself. Each reader is able – or should be able – to interpret and to produce an array of different and stimulating meanings. You shouldn’t be restricted by wondering what the author really meant. The meaning of a literary text lies not in its origin but in its interaction with you, the readers. Understanding a text isn’t a matter of divining the hidden message but of actively creating a meaning. Nevertheless, the author’s intention is still endlessly referred to, sometimes to discount perfectly convincing and interesting readings of texts. It seems that many people want to find an authority to explain the text and provide the final answer. It is this wish for a final meaning that links the word ‘author’ with the word ‘authority’. This desire is particularly heightened in reading literature precisely because literature stimulates a proliferation of meanings. This idea, taken seriously, can seem quite threatening. If thinking about literature makes us think about the world, and there are no right answers about literature, are there any firm answers anywhere? This is why we are asked ‘to show our working’, produce evidence, or argue our case in detail – rather than simply loudly asserting that something is so. Summary ·· It is often assumed that the author determines the meaning of a text. However, the reader also has a role to play. ·· The conventional way of understanding a text as what the author intended makes a number of questionable assumptions about meaning, biographical certainty, authorial presence and evaluation. ·· These ideas are open to question; we all read differently, and even authors can offer only an interpretation of their own texts. There is no one fixed meaning to be found or judged. ·· The role of the author is an invention, developed in the eighteenth century. ·· The term author still functions as an indication of style, genre or, perhaps wrongly, of quality. However, the meaning in the text relies more on your interaction with it than on the writer’s intention.

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9 Metaphors and figures of speech

·· What is a figure of speech? ·· What are metaphors, and how do they work? ·· How do they affect us?

When you study a literary text, you often concentrate on the way it uses language and figures of speech. It is sometimes assumed that these figures of speech, and metaphors particularly, are just ornaments, there to decorate the texts and somehow show an author’s skill (and ‘metaphor-spotting’ can encourage this idea). But they are much more important than this: they convey meanings at all sorts of levels, from the most mundane to the profoundest views we hold about ourselves and the world. Doing English involves not just appreciating figures of speech as ornaments but looking at and considering their significance. Figures of speech everywhere As a rule of thumb, a figure of speech is the use of words or a phrase in a way that isn’t strictly true; the words have been ‘turned away’ from their literal sense and don’t mean what a dictionary might say

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they mean. The technical term for figurative uses of language clearly reflects this: figures of speech of all kinds are called tropes, a term originating from the ancient Greek word tropos, meaning ‘turn, direction, course or way’. There are lots of tropes/figures of speech, and they are not restricted to written texts; people use them all the time in everyday conversation and online. To show how widespread they are, here are seven everyday examples. When you say something like ‘there were millions of people in the room’, you are engaging in what is technically called hyperbole: an exaggerated statement that everybody knows is exaggerated. If you say ‘the book is really good’ but mean you thought it was rubbish, you are using irony, expressing your meaning by saying the opposite of what you actually mean (of course, people can misunderstand your irony). Synecdoche (pronounced ‘sin-ek-duhkey’) and the closely related trope metonymy are two of the most commonly used figures of speech. Synecdoche occurs when people use a part of a thing to represent its whole. For example, the news reporter who says, ‘Number 10 has plans for the economy’ is summing up the government in the image of the building. The sailor who shouts ‘Sail!’ uses the word ‘sail’ to stand for a whole ship. (Writers’ names are one of the most frequent uses of synecdoche, and we hardly notice it. We say ‘Shakespeare’ but mean ‘Shakespeare’s works’.) Metonymy occurs when the name of one thing is given to another thing with which it is associated. For example, ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ means that writing – an activity associated with the pen – is more powerful than fighting – an activity associated with the sword. Animism occurs when we describe something inanimate as if it had life; for example, ‘the angry clouds’. (This is also known as the pathetic fallacy, in the old sense of ‘pathetic’, which means roughly what we intend by ‘sympathetic’ – sharing a feeling. A wild magic power, such as Elsa’s in Frozen, which freezes things with ice and snow when you are angry or sad, is a version of the pathetic fallacy – when the howling wind outside matches a whirling storm inside.) Anthropomorphism is rather like animism, but it names the trope that treats non-human things and animals as if they were human. The statement ‘my computer hates me’ uses anthropomorphism (if we assume that only humans can hate). The British writer George Orwell’s (1903–1950) famous satirical novel Animal Farm (1945) is anthropomorphic, as are the films Toy Story, Cars, Finding Nemo and Finding Dory – the characters (toys, motor vehicles, fish) behave as if they were human. Prosopopeia literally means ‘giving a

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face to’, and it refers to personifying things that properly are abstract. If you imagine death as a figure in black with a scythe, or war as a warrior, or justice as a blindfolded woman, then you are engaging in prosopopoeia. Because we use all these forms so often, you might begin to wonder if any phrases aren’t figures of speech! Metaphors in literature The most widespread figures of speech, metaphors and similes, are of p­ articular importance. Roughly, a metaphor is being used when we say that something is something else (‘love is fire’), and a simile occurs when we say something is like something else (‘my love is like a rose’). But how do these actually work? How do they convey meaning? Like trope, metaphor comes from the ancient Greek. It means ‘transfer’, which is roughly what metaphors do. Formally defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as the ‘application of name or descriptive term to an object to which it is not literally applicable’, metaphors transfer meaning by using a term for one thing to describe something else. George Lakoff and Mark Turner discuss this in detail in their book More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (from which many of the ideas in this chapter come). They argue that metaphors transfer meaning from one conceptual structure to another and so ‘allow us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another’. For example, the first recorded use of the famous metaphor ‘the ship of state’ was by the ancient Athenian ruler Pericles (c. 495– 429 bce). In it, the ‘state’ from one domain (that of politics) is put together with the ‘ship’ from another domain (the sea), so meaning is transferred from one to the other. The first time you hear the metaphor, you might wonder how the state is a ship and what they could possibly have in common, so you think about your concept of a ship. You might decide that a ship needs, say, careful handling during a storm, just as a state needs to be managed during a crisis; or you might expect a captain to be an expert in the winds and tides, or to care for the whole crew, not just their cronies or their own career. Metaphors make us think. Another classical example is ‘Achilles is a lion’. Achilles, the celebrated Greek warrior, is understood to be like a lion: very fierce and brave. Achilles is not actually a lion, but we understand his bravery using terms drawn from the natural world.

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Traditionally, a simile is different from a metaphor because, where a ­ etaphor says, ‘Achilles is a lion’, a simile adds ‘like’ or ‘as’: ‘Achilles is m like a lion’. However, if we understand the process of metaphor as the transfer of meaning from one conceptual structure to another, there is actually very little difference between these two; they both work in the same way, and, because of this, the discussion of metaphor applies equally to similes. You could perhaps say that a simile is simply a weaker form of metaphor. It is less powerful to say something shares qualities with something else – ‘Achilles is as brave as a lion’ – than it is to say it is something else – ‘Achilles is a lion’. In texts that we call literature, metaphors are said to defamiliarise ­language. The transfers of meaning they make are surprising or disturbing because the language with which we are familiar suddenly seems unfamiliar. It’s this that makes us wonder what the text might mean. The novel The Go-Between, by L. P. Hartley (1895–1972), begins with the metaphor, ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’. This metaphor works by using one conceptual domain, geographical space (‘a foreign country’) to describe another (time). But what does it actually mean to say, ‘The past is a foreign country’? That we can’t speak the language? That we are lost? That we might not be welcome there? That we don’t belong there and are only tourists? Is remembering events in one’s life like being a tourist? It is this quality of defamiliarisation that makes us think. Sometimes, of course, texts use metaphors that are so overused that they are clichés, which don’t make us think at all. When we read ‘My love is like a red red rose’, we hardly notice it is metaphorical (it is technically a simile) because, since the Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759–1796) coined it, it has been used countless times. Roses have become a widely accepted metaphor for love, in literary texts and beyond. When Pericles first compared the state to a ship, his audience burst into spontaneous applause, but today the metaphor goes more or less unnoticed. Metaphors in everyday speech The examples so far have been broadly literary, but, as the rose-for-love metaphor suggests, we use metaphors all the time in our everyday speech. When we say that the ‘computers are down’, we don’t mean that they are literally down but that they are not working. Likewise, when the singer James Brown (1933–2006) tells us to ‘get down’, he doesn’t mean that we should lie on the floor but that we should start to dance. (On the other hand, when he tells us to ‘get up’, he does mean, more literally, that we should get up and dance.)

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‘Laid-back’ people are not always reclining, and, even in the 1960s, ‘cool’ people were not actually cold. In movies, gangsters ‘snuff out’ people (you snuff out a candle, so the image is taken from a conceptual domain of lights and lighting) or ‘take them out’ (leaving life is like leaving a building or being ‘taken out’ of an equation). Even when we say that something important is ‘central’, we are using metaphorical language, transferring meaning from a description of physical location (‘central’) to describe something’s importance. In contrast to the defamiliarisation that literary metaphors give us, these sorts of metaphors are often described as dead metaphors. We take their meaning so much for granted that we no longer even notice that they are not literally true. Indeed, ‘dead metaphor’ is itself a dead metaphor. Basic conceptual metaphors Both our everyday metaphors and more explicit literary ones share a characteristic. They tend to build into, or rely on, what Lakoff and Turner call a ‘basic conceptual metaphor’ – an underlying metaphorical idea that generates a whole range of metaphors. This is best explained through an example, and Lakoff and Turner discuss at length the basic conceptual metaphor that says ‘life is a journey’. Many other metaphors, both literary and non-­literary, rely on the basic idea that ‘life is a journey’. Lakoff and Turner show how ‘The Road Not Taken’, perhaps the most famous poem by Robert Frost (1874–1963), relies on this metaphor: the narrator sees his life as a journey down one of two roads. Many famous works of literature play with the comparison between life and a journey. For example, the great long poem The Divine Comedy by the Italian poet Dante (1265–1321) begins: ‘In the middle of life’s road/I found myself in a dark wood’. But this basic conceptual metaphor doesn’t work just in literary texts. Pop songs use it all the time. Robert Johnson (1911–1938), the great blues guitarist of the 1930s, sang of ‘stones in my passway’. In everyday conversation, we use the same basic conceptual metaphor all the time: we ‘go ahead’ with plans; we get ‘sidetracked’; we reach ‘crossroads’ and ‘turning points’ in our lives; we do things in a ‘roundabout way’; like travellers, we are ‘burdened with things from our past’; there are obstacles ‘in our way’; babies ‘begin’ the journey; and the dead ‘rest’ at the end. I used it in the very first paragraph of Chapter 1 when I described this book as a ‘stepping stone’. This basic conceptual metaphor transfers meaning from one domain, our experience of journeys, to another, our experience of life. And we are so used to this basic conceptual metaphor that we all know what people mean when they say, ‘I have reached a crossroads’ (even when,

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in fact, they are sitting quite comfortably at home) or ‘The path I must take is clear’ (when no track is actually in sight). Lakoff analyses many other basic conceptual metaphors of this sort: ‘love is fire’, for example, or ‘a human life is a year’. (What season are you in? What season is the oldest person you know in?) ‘The past is a foreign country’ would be an example of the basic conceptual metaphor ‘times are places’, where different times are associated with different geographical locations. Each of these basic conceptual metaphors works like an engine for producing new metaphors that are generally understood. Interesting poems, novels and plays (and jokes, advertising slogans or, in fact, anything depending on metaphors) use these basic conceptual metaphors in new, defamiliarising ways. They pull new things out of old models and shake up uses of language that we take for granted. Perhaps most radically of all, they can, occasionally, create new basic conceptual metaphors. These have the power to change the way we think about the world, and it is this that makes figures of speech and metaphors in particular so significant. What metaphors mean and how they shape the world So far, I have suggested that metaphors are traditionally understood as the point where language ‘turns away’ from its literal meaning. However, Lakoff and Turner’s idea of basic conceptual metaphors changes this completely. These, like ‘life is a journey’, are so deeply ingrained in us that, as Lakoff and Turner write in their book More Than Cool Reason, they are ‘an integral part of our everyday thought and language’. Moreover, they have a unique, powerful and fundamental role in leading us to ‘understand ourselves and our world in ways no other modes of thought can’. If life is a journey, then we can locate ourselves at a point on that journey – at the beginning, for example – and see things that happen in our life as things that happen to us on a journey – obstacles, crossroads, burdens and so on. The problem here is that this basic metaphor, which we so often accept without thinking, smuggles in a number of taken-for-granted ideas that, in general, we might disagree with if they were presented in another form. For example, if life is a journey, we might ask whether everything that stops you getting your own way is an obstacle. When we have a choice on a journey, it is often a choice of left or right, but in life, is it a choice of one of two options? Perhaps most powerfully, ‘life is a journey’ smuggles in the idea that life must go somewhere, must have a final destination. Does it? The metaphor we choose to use to interpret the world in fact shapes how

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we interpret the world. How we look – the basic conceptual metaphor we choose on purpose or just fall into using by chance – shapes the events we are looking at. If you use a different basic conceptual metaphor, the events may look very different. Another popular example of a basic conceptual metaphor is less personal and more political. Many people, including politicians and businesspeople, like to use the basic metaphor that ‘the country is a business’ and the governing a country is about ‘doing business deals’. Once we are convinced of this, it allows all sorts of other decisions to be made that build on the same basic conceptual metaphor. An employee who is found to be stealing is usually fired. What policies does somebody who believes that ‘the country is a business’ support when a citizen of UK plc. is found stealing? Employees who are no longer able to work are made redundant. What would UK plc. do for an ‘employee’ who could no longer work? Again, the question is which basic conceptual metaphor you decide to use. If you chose ‘the country is a family’ or ‘the country is a band of friends’ as a basic conceptual metaphor, you might come up with very different answers to these questions (for example, who counts as a member?). These basic metaphors have a very powerful influence on our view of the world. Part of doing English involves understanding their power and analysing them when they occur to find out exactly what they take for granted. We might begin with literary texts, certainly, but this can stimulate us to look for basic conceptual metaphors in the wider world and to think about the ideas they depend upon. This is part of thinking about the context in which texts are written and understood. But even more than this, part of the point of studying English, and perhaps part of the point of literature, is to offer new metaphors – not just to surprise us by defamiliarising our normal use of language but also to offer whole new ways of conceptualising the world. For example, what if we thought of our planet not as a planet but as a spaceship? Thinking of things that might worry space explorers (have we got enough oxygen? Are there enough supplies for the journey? What happens if the hull is breached?) might illumine how we act. Or, more abstractly, it is common to think of knowledge as a tree: there is a trunk (core subjects, perhaps) and each subject is a branch, subdividing into smaller branches and twigs as the subject becomes more specialised and farther away from the trunk. But what if a better and more interesting metaphor for knowledge and learning was not a tree but, as the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) suggests, a rhizome (a plant such as grass, a potato or bindweed)? These plants have no centre, no core

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subjects, but move, grow and change independently of a central authority. Each subject, each clump of grass, would be interdependent, not a refined speciality relying on others. There would be no core subjects that everyone had to acknowledge but an array of different and equally valid sorts of knowledges. The point is that basic conceptual metaphors help determine the sort of things we think and that doing English helps us to explore and to question these metaphors. The huge question still remains of why we think in conceptual metaphors and why figures of speech are not just ornaments. I suggested at the beginning of the chapter that a figure of speech was ‘the use of words or a phrase in a way that isn’t strictly true’. Once, in a lecture, I asked what the literal meaning of the metaphor ‘He’s cool’ is. Somebody shouted back, ‘He’s hot!’ which made everybody laugh, as one metaphor was simply replaced with another. But there was a point here. The idea of ‘coolness’ can be understood only metaphorically – there is no literal truth behind it, no actuality that could be unambiguously pointed at, no simple truth from which language could ‘turn’. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) went further. For him, there was no literal truth at all: truth is made up of metaphors. He wrote: What, therefore, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short a sum of human relations which become poetically and theoretically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned, and after long usage seem to a notion fixed, canonic and binding; truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn-out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses. For Nietzsche, there is no literal truth that language can convey, and all words in language are really just figures of speech. We think in metaphors, and they grasp and control our minds. One contemporary philosopher, Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), describes the way metaphors grasp our mind as ‘metaferocity’. We are so used to metaphors and what they take for granted, however, that they have become dead metaphors – worn out and powerless – and yet they seem to be true. If Nietzsche is correct, the usual understanding of tropes is completely incorrect: they are not ‘turnings’ of language away from truth or just ornaments. Quite the opposite – figures of speech are the fabric from which the truth of the world is made up. So when we look at the metaphors in a poem, we are, at the same time, thinking about how the whole world is understood.

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Summary ·· Figures of speech (or tropes) occur when language is used in a way that isn’t strictly true. We use them all the time. Metaphors and similes are the most common examples. ·· Metaphorical language describes one thing as another (‘my love is a burning fire’). It works by transferring meaning, allowing us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another. Literary metaphors defamiliarise language, but we also use metaphors in everyday speech, often without noticing. A metaphor we don’t notice is a dead metaphor. ·· Both literary and everyday metaphors rely on basic conceptual ­metaphors, such as ‘life is a journey’. These work like engines for producing other, generally understood metaphors. Some people argue that these basic metaphors are so deeply ingrained in us that they shape how we see the world. The philosopher Nietzsche argued that metaphors are so taken for granted that we simply think of them as the truth and no longer recognise them as metaphors at all.

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10 Narrative and closure

·· Why are stories important? ·· How do we understand narrative and narrators? ·· What is closure?

The last chapter looked at some of the ways in which language was ­important in texts and in understanding the world. But we also use stories to order the world, and, of course, story – or, more technically, narrative – is what many literary texts are made of. A lot of newer approaches to literature draw heavily upon questions of language and meaning, as I discussed in the previous chapter. However, there is also a great deal written about how we use narrative to order and give meaning to our world(s). Doing English means ­engaging with and understanding narrative. How are narratives made? Many people study literature because they are swept away by stories. They find books ‘unputdownable’ and read late into the night; my friend Matt used to hide in the toilets at work to finish the novel he was reading. This is part of the power of narrative. It isn’t just novels, of course. Soap operas, poems, plays, films and in fact nearly every sort of text rely on this narrative drive,

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the desire to find out ‘what happens next’. Narrative is everywhere, not only in fiction; it’s central to each of our lives. When we are born (or at least when we can take notice of what’s going on!) we find ourselves ‘thrown’ into the middle of things and other people’s lives. In order to make sense of what’s going on, we tell ourselves stories. I’m sure that most of us – when we were younger – have done the same thing as the main character in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by the Irish novelist James Joyce (1882–1941). At school, he wrote down ‘his name and where he was: Stephen Dedalus, Class of Elements, Clongowes Wood College, Sallins, County Kildare, Ireland, Europe, The World, The Universe’. This is a sort of story, about identifying who and where he was. And we are told, and tell ourselves stories about, what has happened to us or who we are and who we want to be, whether we update Facebook, tweet, Instagram or write them down in diaries or transform them into poems or fiction or – more often – just think and talk them through. These stories are how we organise and sort out the chaotic world. They are how we give the world meaning. For example, if you are asked to tell someone about yourself – at an interview, say – you quickly outline the broad story of who you are, where you come from and so on. You probably would not relate some anecdote from your childhood or describe in agonising detail your morning’s journey. You present your story of yourself, organising the narrative and selecting what you take to be the most effective and meaningful aspects. This ‘organising’ is a way of constructing the story of yourself: an activity that everybody undertakes, consciously or not. We do this on social media all the time, of course. Because narrative is so important and so all-pervasive in our lives and in the texts we read, study, watch and create, critics have been trying to define and understand it for a long time. A Russian theorist, Vladimir Propp (1895– 1970) studied folk tales and argued that each of these fairy stories was put together using some or all of 31 narrative motifs. In each story, for example, the ‘hero would leave home’ or the story would end in communal coming together – a wedding or reunion. In a way, Propp was making an attempt to make more formal what, in the case of fairy stories, is quite obvious: that Prince Charming from ‘Snow White’ serves the same function, or does the same job, as Prince Charming from ‘Cinderella’. His ‘character’ as such doesn’t really matter (as long as he is charming, of course. Bill Willingham’s comic Fables, in which fairy-tale characters are real, makes great play of this; the same devilishly handsome but unreliable man is the ex-husband of Cinderella, Snow White and Briar Rose). What matters is his role in the story as the hero, the rescuer of the heroine from the villains, whether they are the

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evil witch or ugly sisters. The villains, too, are only significant because of their function. Hollywood blockbusters can be analysed (and, indeed, are often written) in the same way: function by function. Propp’s ambition, and the aim of those who came after him, was not simply to analyse fairy stories or movies but to create a ‘science’ of narrative, or narratology. This would be a way of breaking down all narratives in all forms into their constituent parts. There have been many rigorous attempts to do this. These attempts have had some worthwhile results. Certainly, this ‘­scientific’ approach to narrative generated some quite precise terms. For example, one that is quite widely used is diegetic: this is a more formal way of specifying the ‘world of the story’. Gotham exists in the diegetic world of Batman; East Egg and West Egg exist in the diegetic world of The Great Gatsby; Springfield exists in the diegetic world of the Simpsons. However, overall, this project does seem flawed in a number of ways. In looking for general laws of narrative, narratology passes over the individual nature of specific texts and is interested only in functions. While this is fine for simpler forms of narrative (fairy tales, or rather formulaic fiction, say), it seems to miss out much that is valuable. It is also ‘blind’ to historical difference: as both Shakespeare and SpongeBob rely on narrative, so narratology treats these two art forms from different periods, media and genres as if they were the same. Moreover, each attempt to analyse the text has presuppositions: Propp chose to look at ‘the actions of characters’, while another narratologist, Gérard Genette (b. 1930), chose to look at the ways a novel uses time, exploring how the ‘action’ jumped backwards and forwards (with ‘flash backs’ or what he called analepsis and ‘flash forwards’ or prolepsis). Foreshadowing, in which events yet to come are hinted at, also plays with the nature of time. However, these approaches are neither natural nor scientific but arbitrary. One could break down a novel in terms of where the narrative takes place and how the characters move rather than when, for example. It’s also important to know what sort or genre a story is. In any bookshop, there are shelves for all sorts of novel genres: thrillers, romances, science fiction, fantasy. These definitions can be even more detailed: a genre of novels set in universities (the ‘campus novel’); thrillers where the lead character is a forensic scientist, perhaps. Each genre has its own generic conventions, parts of plot or style that are special to that genre. These occur both in the content (you expect a murder in a whodunit, or a marriage at the end of a comic play) and in the style (for example, a spare, terse style in a hard-boiled detective story). Importantly, these conventions also shape our expectations in reading; sometimes these are confirmed, sometimes they are played with by

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texts. In ‘Macbeth Murder Mystery’ (1937), a short story by James Thurber (1894–1961), a hotel guest picks up Macbeth rather than the crime thriller of the sort she usually reads. But because she is used to reading ‘whodunnits’, where, for example, the most obvious suspect is rarely actually the murderer, she discovers that Macbeth is innocent of the murders attributed to him, and the real killer is… someone else (you’ll have to read it). But perhaps the most important question about narrative is the question of narration: who is telling the story? Narrators Do all stories have narrators? Literary texts certainly do. Sometimes the ­narrators are inside the diegetic – inside the world of the story. Often these are ‘first-person narratives’ in which ‘I’ tell the events that have happened to me, like ‘voice overs’ in a film. Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) is a ‘first-person narrative’ (in fact, it’s double this, as an unnamed narrator retells, word for word, the first-person narrative he has been told by the sailor Marlow). But if one person is telling you a story, this immediately raises questions of narrative reliability. How far can you trust the narrator of a ‘first-person’ story? After all, they don’t know what the other characters are thinking or doing, and they are surely telling you what they think is important and what they think is going on. It is easy to imagine a novel in which what the first-person narrator tells us is happening and the actual events are quite different. Indeed, in Heart of Darkness, there are ‘slips’ between the narrator and the story they are telling, leading readers to suspect that the first person narrator isn’t being entirely honest. For example, Marlow, the main narrator in Heart of Darkness, describes the genocidal activities of the Europeans in the Congo and yet seems unwilling to face – clearly – his own complicity with them. (Perhaps it is precisely this struggle between his need to ‘confess’ and his unwillingness to do so that gives the novel its particular and peculiar tension.) This is called an ‘unreliable narrator’. Sometimes, however, the narrator is outside the diegetic and seems almost to disappear from the story that they are telling. This is ‘third-person’ narration, in which the characters do things that the (nameless) narrator describes. These sort of narrators are often described as omniscient, all-knowing, because they do seem to know everything. They can, quite literally, get into the head of the characters and tell you if they are afraid or happy or if they are hiding something. Traditionally, most novels have this sort of narration: it is the narrator who begins Pride and Prejudice (1813)

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by Jane Austen (1775–1817) with ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’ (but is the narrator being ironic? Even omniscient narrators are characters). However, omniscient narrators do not narrate everything. Indeed, part of the power of narrative – ‘first’ or ‘third-person’- lies in the focalisation of the narrative on or with certain characters. For example, a detective in a murder story may not be the narrator, but the narrative accompanies her or him, rather than, say, one of the bystanders, and only reveals what the detective finds out. The narrative often takes one person’s side over another, for example, and who or what the narrator focuses on is very revealing. The story of a murder and its solution told from the point of view of the murderer would certainly be an interesting read, but would it be a detective story? The use of focalisation is very significant, too, in the way it can change what we think about a story. For example, in an adventure story, the narrative focuses on the hero, not on, say, the hapless guard shot dead by the hero as he escaped from the villain’s secret underground lair at the end of the third chapter. But if the focalisation showed that guard to be a character too, with his own hopes and fears, perhaps the story – and the murderous hero – would look very different. Perhaps the guard works for the villain because he needs the money for an operation for his ill mother or because he comes from a poverty-stricken part of the world, and the hero simply guns him down. These choices of narrative focalisation shape the meaning of the text. Thinking about focalisation in this way can offer unsettling insights into texts. For example, although Heart of Darkness is set in Africa and is in no small part about the colonial relationship between Africans and Europeans, and even though there are African characters, at no point is the narrative ‘focalised’ through an African character; the reader is never allowed ‘inside their head’. Once this is clear, then other aspects of the novel and its context come more clearly into view. Closure However, these ways of analysing and understanding narrative don’t seem to explain either its importance or why we find narratives so compelling. ‘Spoiler alert’ is shorthand for ‘don’t read this if you don’t want to find out what happens on this episode before you watch it’. However, this idea of spoiling raises the question of how we value stories. Would we still read Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen if we knew beforehand (spoiler alert!) they get married at the end? Thinking about what is and is not spoiled in your

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experience by a ‘spoiler’ reveals something crucial. Wanting both ‘to know how things end’ and to experience the process of getting to that end, the ‘putting off’ of the finish, is absolutely vital for all stories, from the longest Victorian novels to the shortest cartoons to the most recent Netflix series. It is one of the most important things about literature (and about life), and it is called closure. A spoiler also shows how the ending of a story is already implicit in its beginning. The spoiler only works if you are already involved in the story. Even right at the beginning, a story has an end, a goal, a conclusion to which it is heading. Stories are teleological: they begin with an end in mind. Despite the fact that it is so important, closure – this ‘wanting to know how things end’, this feeling of teleology – is quite hard to pin down and, like many things in English, it is often just ‘taken for granted’. (For example, the basic conceptual metaphor discussed in the last chapter – ‘life is a journey’ – is a teleological metaphor: by suggesting that a life is a journey, it implies that there is a final destination that will provide closure for ‘life’s story’.) However, although we may not be able to offer a strict definition of our desire for a ‘sense of the ending’ (as a famous book by the British critic Frank Kermode named it), it is possible to see closure at work. Characters on TV often say that they need closure in their life (‘I need closure in my relationship with my ex’). They mean that they need to finish one part of their life, tie up all the loose ends so that they can move on. And in everyday life, there are many events that are ‘acts of closure’. Graduation at university is an event that marks the end, the closure of a part of your life. Funerals don’t end the mourning, but they end the immediate period of grief after someone has died. We feel that these acts ‘close a chapter’. This is a key idea in understanding closure: we construct closure just as we construct narratives of ourselves. This is why closure is also one of the links between the stories we read or see and our own lives; they both rely on closure to make sense. This is how the novelist Henry James (1843–1916) put it: Really, universally, relations stop nowhere and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle in which they shall happily appear to do so…He is in the perpetual predicament that the continuity of things is the whole matter for him, of comedy and of tragedy; that this continuity is never broken, and that, to do anything at all, he has at once intensely to consult and intensely to ignore it.

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What this means is that things (‘relations’) keep on going on (your school or college will still be there after you leave) and what artists do is decide how to ‘draw’ the events, what bits to choose and where to end. In this sense, we are all artists whenever we tell a story. Life goes on, with its continuous events, and all stories, fictional or real, are made by decisions about where to end. Do you stop telling the story at the couple’s wedding? (a happy ending)? Or at the fatal car accident that kills one of the newlyweds (a very sad ending)? Or with the survivor falling in love again (happy) but being broken hearted when the new love leaves for Peru (sad)? And so it goes on. For Henry James, the artist’s choice is where and how to end, how to construct a sense of closure. Nearly all texts use closure – it’s how all stories work after all. Some end with a very satisfying ‘tying up of loose ends’: the murderer is caught, the wedding happens, or the main character dies. Others are less final and, in recent years, some texts have purposely tried to avoid ‘closure’ by leaving lots of loose ends, unfinished plots and so on. An example of this is the short novel The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) by Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937). This novel in part concerns what might or might not be a massive conspiracy that the central character investigates, but she never actually discovers whether it is a conspiracy or whether she is imagining it all. The point seems to be not only to show that closure is sometimes a bit hackneyed but also to draw attention precisely to the way in which it is constructed, especially in fiction. But these sorts of novels only work because you expect closure, so they, too, are using closure, but in a different way. Closure is a key term for studying literature and is vitally important for thinking about how the content, form and structure of a text shape its meaning. Knowing about closure allows you to compare different novels, poems and plays by looking at how they ‘achieve closure’, which means, really, how their stories work. You might ask yourself how a thriller ‘achieves closure’ compared with a historical novel, for example, or how conclusive the ending actually is. The question remains of why our need for closure is so strong. Why do we want to know what happens? There is no one answer to this, but some of the critical theory you will encounter in English studies will examine the issue. Frank Kermode suggested that, perhaps, because we know how the story of our own life is going to end – the way all lives end – in death, the endings of the stories we read or tell are like ‘little deaths’ that will allow us to come to terms with our own, real death. It might also be because closure is a way of constructing and imposing order on a chaotic world, a way of drawing our own circle.

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Of course, English is not immune to the desire for closure. The desire to come up with the right answer or the final interpretation is in part the desire for ‘closure’: the end of studying this book or that play. However, if closure is constructed, so are our readings and interpretations that rely on closure. Closure is unavoidable and necessary but, at the same time, has to be seen for what it is: a way of finishing a story or – in the case of the subject of English – finishing with a story. But literature, although perhaps based on closure, has a habit of not letting itself be ‘closed up’. Because there are many different interpretations of texts, we know that a sense of closure, of a final answer, is a construct, and that an interpretation can be opened again, reconstructed or deconstructed by different readers in different contexts. So to think about closure is to think about our own reading and the ways in which we impose our own meaning on texts. When you’re doing English, the texts might be literary, but we can also think about the ways in which we impose meaning on the ‘texts’ of our lives and those of others. Summary ·· Narratives are everywhere and are very powerful. We tell stories in order to make sense of the world and ourselves. ·· Some critics have tried to develop a ‘science’ of narrative, which has helped refine discussions of how stories work. ·· There are different sorts of narrators. Some narrators are ‘inside’ the story while others are ‘outside’, but both sorts of narration shape the meaning of the text. ·· Closure is our ‘sense of an ending’ and is part of all narrative. Some critics suggest that we seek closure to impose order on our lives or to come to terms with our own deaths. ·· In thinking about closure, we can also think about the ways in which we try to impose meaning and ‘final interpretations’ on texts.

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11 Creative writing and critical rewriting

·· ·· ·· ·· ··

What is creative writing? What is intertextuality? What is critical rewriting? How is creative writing marked? How has creative writing changed doing English?

When I was a student, I asked a question about sonnets. The lecturer – a poet as well as an academic – astonished me by saying that the best way to really find out about sonnets was to write one. I think I was astonished by the audacity (that I might dare to write a sonnet, as if I were an author and not a student!) but more by the obvious simple rightness of this suggestion. After all, no one learns to swim on dry land. In English, though all reading is active, creative writing particularly stresses heuristic learning: heuristic means learning by doing, finding out, rather than being told or by simply analysing. What is creative writing? The disciplines of English and of creative writing are clearly related: both involve writing and responding to literature. Many famous critics who helped shape English as a subject were also poets and novelists. Like many siblings,

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they do not always get on all the time, but they can learn from one another. In a general sense, all the texts studied in the discipline of English are ‘creative’. But creative writing more specifically names the study not only of the works of past and current writers by students but also of the production of new creative works. Students become writers not only of interesting essays and analyses of texts but of their own poems, short stories, novels, plays, journals and other literary forms. Writing is a very productive (and hard) form of learning. But what is creative writing? Can people be taught to be poets, playwrights or novelists? Like most questions in English, answering this involves several other ideas. If creative writing is about enabling students to be authors, this too raises a question, one that has generated a great deal of contentious discussion in creative writing about what an author is or does. Some of the appeal of creative writing lies, of course, in the figure of the ‘author’ (which is one reason why the issues discussed in Chapter 8 about authorship, authority and intention have been so contentious). There is an attraction in the idea of being an author and becoming famous or, perhaps more interestingly, being able to articulate something important about oneself or the world: to say something. But this idea of the author, as a sort of inspired genius, absorbed in self-expression, has also been a problem for teaching and learning creative writing. As I suggested in Chapter 8, the idea of what the author was has changed over time. To some extent, the idea of authors as inspired figures, able to express the truth about themselves or the world, is inherited from the Romantic period at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This idea of the author fits very well with current unquestioned ideas about celebrity, in which it seems that famous writers, actors, musicians and so on are assumed to know not just more about writing, acting and music than non-celebrities (which is reasonable) but also more about world politics, life and everything else (which, on reflection, is odd). But if one believed completely in the idea that authors are inspired geniuses then, of course, creative writing could not be taught and would not be part of English. Writing would just ‘happen’ as the moment of genius struck. In fact, all writers have learned to write. Writing is not a natural skill; like learning an instrument, it has to be taught, practiced, developed and so on. Writers learn to write well by writing and writing. And then writing. The contrasting view of creative writing is that it is a discipline that teaches the students ‘craft’, the technical skills of writing. Steve May, in his book Doing Creative Writing, describes this clearly. He begins: You want to write a story. I don’t know what your story is about, what genre you want to write it in, or anything else about it. However,

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because (I believe) stories share common features, I can be fairly ­certain that if you ask yourself the following questions about your story, it will help you discover its shape and point: Who is it about? How do they change over the course of the story? What do they want? Do they get what they want? Who (or what) is trying to stop them? What are the key events in the story? Which event decides whether the main character gets or doesn’t get what he or she wants? How does it end? Which other characters are absolutely essential to the story? Where is the best place to start? These are technical questions about writing and the decisions writers make. The author works to learn a craft, to put together a story, poem or play and to learn the elements that make them up. The ideas and skills involved in this extend across many different fields; creative writing need not lead to being a poet or novelist (just as studying maths does not necessarily lead to jobs in mathematics). But more than this, writing is a form of thinking; in her book on the subject, Michelene Wandor argues that creative writing is a ‘mode of imaginative thought’. Here she echoes the wonderful British novelist Angela Carter (1940–1992), who writes what ‘I really like doing is writing fiction and trying to work things out that way’. For Carter, novels were partly ‘thought experiments’ that tried to explore imaginatively – but not necessarily answer – certain problems or issues, ‘to work things out’. However, all subjects one learns and studies are attempts to explore certain problems: physical geography explores why landscapes are the way they are, for example; and the sciences, at their best, need creative and imaginative responses. What is at issue with creative writing is not just that it is a mode of thought but how it thinks, as it were – what its tools are. The tools of creative writing as a subject are the literature, criticism and theory that are involved with any literary creative act. (Angela Carter again: ‘reading is just as creative an activity as writing and most intellectual development depends on new readings of old texts. I am all for putting new wine in old bottles; especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode’.) Creative writing is another important way of engaging with

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literature, another of the new ideas that are reshaping English as a subject, stressing the heuristic – learning by doing. It brings together you, your ideas, what you have read, different and new thoughts and interpretations with hands-on experience of writing in a range of different ways. All literary texts are a web of creations and recreations. They draw on and refer to each other, implicitly or explicitly. Sometimes this is to do with form (I’m writing a sonnet to impress you, because Shakespeare did), sometimes with plot or character or any other aspect. Sometimes this is a simple development (a writer might ask: what if Sherlock Holmes was alive today?); sometimes it is more complicated (what if the detective was not Holmes, a powerful, arrogant, athletic man, but a quiet, humble, kind old lady?). It’s as important to long novels, where issues and themes reappear, as it is to songs in which the performer calls out others for their inadequacies. A series of books about a dystopia cannot but refer back to other books about the same topic; how is it the same, how is it different? These relationships between texts called are intertextual; intertextuality is the way texts refer to each other and how aspects move between them. Intertextuality leads to one of the techniques that English has learned from creative writing and perhaps the most widely practiced in English courses at school and university level: critical rewriting. This involves taking an established text and reworking parts of it; for example, a scene from a novel could be rewritten from a different perspective or in a different context. This is no different, really, from what theatre directors or film and TV adaptors do when they stage a Shakespeare play (‘What happens to Hamlet if we are performing it for soldiers?’; ‘What happens to The Taming of the Shrew when we move it to Padua High School?’). More interestingly, this process of creative rewriting can tell us about the original text, about the new format and about their interaction. For example, the Facebook status update version of Pride and Prejudice tells us about the Jane Austen novel by focusing on the key incidents, on contrasting views and on the events of the narrative. But it also tells us about the genre of Facebook updates: it shows, really clearly, for example, the discipline involved in having to say something funny, clever or moving in only a few words. Most interestingly, both the original novel and the Facebook rewriting – and Facebook and Twitter more generally – share a common feature in their use of irony and humour. Mallory Ortberg’s (b. 1986) Texts from Jane Eyre (2016) does a similar thing for a wider range of literature. If people learn new things by reading texts in different ways, they also learn by writing or rewriting them in different ways.

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Creative writing as a subject, then, although it’s been around for a while, is one of the new ideas that form part of doing English today. If some of the ideas described as theory focus a little more on what texts mean, creative writing focuses on how they mean, even though, at some deeper level, these two – what something means, how it means – are versions of the same question. In an excellent book about new ways of teaching English and creative writing, Ben Knights and Chris Thurgar-Dawson argue that the value in writing lies not so much in self-expression or literary prizes but ‘as an educational process that permits deeper engagement with the already written’. Creative writing and critical rewriting are about changing not only what you as students think but also what you do: not producing essays or analyses but also different sorts of heuristic responses to literary texts, ideas and thoughts. It helps students think – and write – as active writers. In this, the creativity of writing and the creativity of reading are really revealed as the same thing; the best creative writers are also the best creative readers. Creative writing is active reading. In this way, creative writing and critical rewriting are changing the nuts and bolts of how English is studied and taught. Nuts and Bolts Assessment Changing the nuts and bolts of English means, among other things, changing how work in English and in creative writing is marked, and one of the questions that has often been asked about creative writing in education is about how it might be assessed. On the one hand, ‘creative writing’ is assessed and valued all the time: newspapers or Internet reviews judge novels, poems and plays; people who teach courses choose the most interesting books they can; we recommend (or don’t) books or TV programs to our friends. As I suggested in writing about the canon in Chapter 6, you can’t escape literary value. On the other hand, it is very hard to imagine giving actual marks to great poets. People involved in creative writing and running creative-writing degrees have spent a very long time thrashing out these issues, and the answer again turns on the heuristic and practical. To begin with, much of the work done by students in this area is divided into two parts: a creative part – the poem, short story, film scene – and a critical, or reflective, part. In order to assess the first, creative part, teachers have provided very detailed assessment criteria, focusing on relevant issues to the writing:

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·· How effectively did the piece presented explore the point of view of the main character? • How clearly has the plot been advanced in this scene? ·· Does the choice of rhyme scheme (or lack of rhyme scheme) suit the subject? In turn, the critical and reflective part might be, for example, an essay on the technical features (say, the sort of tropes that, following Chapter 9, your creative piece might have used and why you chose them), or a piece laying out the aims of your creative work and assessing how far you were successful, or a discussion of how you saw your creative piece about growing up in Newcastle in the wider context of other novels and stories about childhood. If the main form of assessment for creative writing has been the creative work together with some reflective work, the main form of teaching creative writing has been the workshop or seminar. The novelist and creative writing teacher Douglas Cowie writes that a Creative Writing Workshop is usually run in part or in whole as an opportunity for student writers to submit work-in-progress for consideration by their peers, under the guidance of an experienced writer. A student’s work will be read by each member of the group, either during the workshop or beforehand, and the group will then discuss the poem, story, novel extract or play, offering constructive criticism about how the piece does and doesn’t achieve its aims, and also offering suggestions for improvement of the piece. There are a number of variations on how creative writing workshop discussions can be run, and in my own teaching I’ve organized them in different ways depending on (among other things) the experience, size and ability of the particular group. However, the basic foundation of a student’s work-in-progress receiving oral and/or written feedback from his or her peer group under the guidance of a more experienced mentor is common to most workshops. Like much in English, the creative writing workshop is controversial and can, of course, be difficult. However, workshops do also reflect an interesting and often forgotten thing about writing itself. While the image of the writer is of a lone person creating by themselves – and there are writers that fit this stereotype – usually writers are involved in communities of different sorts. Novelists and non-fiction writers have friends and competitors (often the same people) to whom they show drafts, as well as editors

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(wonderful editors, as the Routledge editor Polly Dodson suggests I add here) and ­publishers who look at their work and make suggestions. Writers for the stage, TV and film have many collaborators from (one hopes) the informed and sympathetic directors to (one fears) the less scrupulous people for whom art is simply another business. Poets read to each other, attend events and festivals, form supportive groups, compose manifestos and make aesthetic friends and enemies to help shape their own writing. The creative writing workshop is a version – perhaps a delimited and controlled version – of these different and jostling communities, so doing creative writing is also about learning how to be in these communities. Creative English? Creative writing/critical rewriting should enable you as writers and allow new ways of understanding literature and its interpretation. But these changes have an impact on all the other parts of the subject of English too. Paul Dawson in his book Creative Writing and the New Humanities, for example, discusses ‘Fictocriticism’ or ‘personal criticism’, a sort of criticism that draws more and more on the personal voice and on personal responses to texts. But, at its root, all responses to literature are our own, reflected on, evaluated and changed by all we have learned and thought. You might not need to invoke a personal voice or (as the eminent Shakespeare critic Stephen Greenblatt does) tell a story about one’s father to be creative in your responses. Another great twentieth-century critic, Geoffrey Hartman (1929–2016), argued as long ago as 1980 that ‘all criticism entails a rethinking, which is itself creative … in every aspect of learning and life’. Because of this, like creative writing, other sorts of ways of responding to texts, other sorts of literary criticism ‘may cross the line and become as demanding as literature’; criticism is ‘an unpredictable and unstable genre’ not limited to a commentary on literary texts. All responses to literature are creative. Summary ·· English and creative writing are related disciplines. ·· Creative writing focuses on you as a writer. ·· A creative writer is not an inspired genius or simply following a craft but someone learning about and responding to literature in a ­different, more heuristic way.

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·· One form of this is critical rewriting, which involves reworking an already existing text or part of a text. ·· Creative writing is often assessed by both a piece of creative work and a piece of reflective work. ·· Creative writing stresses the creativity at work in all responses to literary art.

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English and you

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12 English, politics and identity

·· What is politics, and what does English have to do with it? ·· What do different critical attitudes mean for the issue of literature and politics? ·· How does the study of literature become involved with national identity? ·· Why has English been a political battleground?

English as a discipline is not a neutral subject; in English, ideas about ­individual, communal and national identity and society, culture and politics meet, mix and often become indistinguishable from each other. This chapter explores the complicated interaction between English, politics and identity and explains why English is often a controversial ‘battleground’ subject. English and the polis But what does politics mean, in this context? Usually, when we talk about ‘politics’, we mean the parties in power, upcoming elections or the personal qualities of politicians. But politics is really about much more than that; the word comes from the ancient Greek word polis, meaning ‘city’, which hangs on in words like ‘metropolitan’, ‘polity’ and – as characters in Men at

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Arms (1993) by the British writer Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) pointed out – ‘police officer’ as well as ‘politician’. Polis means more than ‘city’, though; it means ‘community’ or, more widely, ‘society’. So politics is about people, societies and how we live together, not just the events at Westminster, in Berlin, Moscow or Washington: the word covers an enormous area of human life. Literature, too, is involved with people, societies and how we get along with one another and, because they deal with the same issues, literature and politics are inevitably bound together. But some thinkers argue there is an even more profound reason. What makes the human animal special is language. Language makes our society possible; it means we can pass down ideas and identities; we can become known to others and ourselves; we can discuss, argue, entertain and explain. And politics and literature – as the prime places where our lives are shared – are both conducted in language. The ancient Greeks (again!) had terms to describe the sorts of language used in rhetoric, but they apply to literature and perhaps all our shared uses of language. When we get together, actually or virtually, and use language to reason, this is logos (where we get the word ‘logic’ from). But we also talk or write (or argue) using feeling, pathos (like our word empathy and sympathy). And we also share, explain and explore our values, our ethos (our word ethics). Politicians appeal to reason, feeling and values all the time in speeches. Literature too it is full of and provokes arguments where we reason about meaning. But the study of literature is one of the few places individual experiences and feeling are taken seriously as knowledge, as something you can learn about. Its hallmark is, as the critic Robert Young writes, the ‘value and attention it gives to the personal and the subjective’: other subjects might explain what happened – English does too – but only English explores how it feels. And finally, literature and its study is a place where values are discovered and understood, not as lists of rules but as complex, living interactions with our lives; this is, in part, the importance of making your own judgements about literature and coming to your own conclusions. This interweaving of the literary and the political at this deep level means that arguments that might at first appear to be about what should or shouldn’t be on the curriculum or exam, about the canon, about how people should talk and write really turn out to be about persuading people to see the world in one way or another. Controlling English is controlling how people think, feel and decide. Much of this book has been about the relationship between the polis and English. I outlined, for example, how the ‘canon’ was where ideas about artistic worth and political values came

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together; I showed how Shakespeare has been used for political purposes. But the wider critical attitudes I discussed in Chapter 5 have political ramifications too. Critical attitudes and politics These attitudes are broad characterisations of how you can approach a ­literary text. The extrinsic attitude moves from the text out to the context. It argues that literature is about the world and is worth studying for what it tells us about the world. In contrast, the intrinsic attitude focuses on the text itself, its form and structure. It suggests that texts, especially ‘great texts’, have an ingrained artistic value and so are worth studying in their own right. These two attitudes lead to very different understandings of the relationship between politics and literature. The extrinsic attitude: Literature as politics? Looking back over Chapter 5, you can see that those who share the extrinsic attitude will have no problem explaining how literature is political. Because texts are about the world, they will also be about how we get along – that is, about politics. Some critics show, for example, how texts display ideas about the politics of the time they were written or the political ideas of the author. Or the extrinsic attitude might suggest that the texts display, without the author’s knowledge, a range of contextual political ideas. Others, sharing this extrinsic attitude, will concentrate on how texts are used. One example of this is the cultural materialist approach to Shakespeare, which looks at the way ‘Shakespeare’ – both the plays and the institution – is a construct of present-day political, cultural and economic concerns. In this case, literature and ways of interpreting literature are seen as a political tool to be questioned, taken over or taken back. Where the political position of an approach or a text is hidden, the aim of the extrinsic critic is to uncover it. Many of those who share the extrinsic attitude understand English to be cultural politics, a rather catchall term for thinking about the relationship between politics and culture. Politics is involved in different spheres of what people do; there are national, regional and local politics, for example, as well as the politics of the workplace, say, or the politics of the playground. Cultural politics argues that politics is reflected in culture and that culture

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in turn reflects back and influences how we get along. Just as the canon is a mixture of art and politics, so a political idea (such as ‘everyone should be equal’) has cultural effects. (Would a film that argued that people shouldn’t be equal be acceptable? Would it be successful?) If English is a version of cultural politics, then each text we study is a political event, and every text tries to convince us of certain ideas about how we should get along. Some people argue that doing cultural politics is the whole point of doing English – using literature to question how the world is represented and shaped. However, this does seem to suggest that all art is a sort of propaganda. More, while thinking about the assumptions is obviously vital, perhaps following a single explicit political agenda might risk simply replacing ‘one way of doing English’ with another ‘one way of doing English’. The intrinsic attitude: Literature versus politics? In contrast, the intrinsic attitude, again discussed in Chapter 5, implies a very different understanding of the interweaving between society and literature. For critics who share the intrinsic attitude, to see English as cultural politics is to miss the artistic worth, the ‘literary-ness,’ of a work of literature. To do English is to concentrate on the special features that make a work of literature great art. It is wrong, from this point of view, to look at the sociology, polemical messages or social intent of a literary text. In this sense, they might argue, literature is counter to politics and to the way in which people use power. This idea has also been questioned. It seems to imply that you could think about a text in a vacuum, separate from the world. It also implies that judgements about value can be unaffected by other opinions and ideas that you might have. For example, a work might offer a viewpoint about society with which you disagree completely, but you might still value it as a great work. Yet even this approach assumes that literature is involved in how we get along. Indeed, if the power of literature lies in the ways in which experience is represented and structured, perhaps it is the ‘great works of art’ that do this most acutely. Some people who follow the intrinsic attitude argue that literature teaches moral truths or that it embodies the human spirit. But you don’t have to believe this to see that an artwork can have an amazing, unpredictable and transformative effect on people’s lives and situations. Exploring and perhaps fostering these effects is, in the end, about how we get along, which is why studying literature is about politics in the widest sense.

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Where does your communal identity come from? Perhaps the most important aspect of the politics of literature lies its relations to our personal and communal identities. It is called, after all, English, which names a language and a nationality, and I sketched the history of and reasons for this in Chapter 2. But in the second decade of the twenty-first century in the United Kingdom, ideas about identity and the national community have become increasingly fraught and contentious, as Brexit is showing. These issues of communal identity are not just about big sporting occasions or the symbols on your passport but also influence how you behave, your expectations, your relations with others and, more importantly perhaps, others’ relations with you. It affects what language you speak, how you understand the world and your place in it – it shapes the presuppositions you have when you read. It is sometimes assumed that your nationality creates your culture, as if the tree of culture grew from the soil of national identity, but, as I will show, it is your culture that creates your nationality. Culture is a vital component – if not the vital component – of national identity, and it is in culture that battles about national identity are fought, which again puts English on the frontline. Why is culture so important to national identity? In his book Imagined Communities (revised edition 1991), Benedict Anderson (1936–2015) offers a crucial insight into the origins of communal and national identity. He argues that nations are created and constructed culturally. They are, in his key phrase, ‘imagined communities’ in two senses. First, they are ‘imaginary’ communities because, despite any nationalistic rhetoric, a nation cannot be a real community: simply, nations are too big for any one person to know any but the smallest fraction of the total population. Even in a smallish town of 50,000 people, it’s hard to imagine one person knowing everybody (how many of your Facebook friends do you really know, in fact?). In the United Kingdom, with a population of nearly 60 million people, even meeting everybody just once would be impossible. Second, and more important, nations are imagined because they exist in the imagination; they are put together with images and ideas. There is no ‘real’ national identity, no ‘essence’ to being British (or Colombian or Kenyan or…). Instead, there is a shared stock of images, ideas, stories and traditions, all of which go together to help each of us ‘imagine’ (and so identify) ourselves as British (or Colombian or Kenyan…). And perhaps this process of identification is not unlike how we imagine ourselves to be characters in a novel, living out conflicts and adventures. Yet, even if the notion of national identity is essentially imaginary, it has very real consequences, ranging from where you can live and what you earn to, as history

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shows, war and persecution. An imagined community binds people together in a ‘we.’ In the case of a national identity, nations foster the idea that all those who claim to be of that nationality lay claim to something in common. This idea of community implies a deep solidarity, crossing over boundaries of class, race, gender, education, upbringing, religion and so on. Anderson suggests that borders between countries are not just geographical but also divide nation from nation, ‘them’ from ‘us’ in the imagination. This means that the many transnational and global links that cross these borders – trade, alliances like NATO, international organisations like the United Nations or the European Union – change who we think we are, our views of ourselves and others. This is one reason these are so fraught with controversy. The Brexit referendum of 2016 and the ensuing debates are less about trade deals and tariffs and more about how British (English, Northern Irish, Scottish, Welsh) people think of themselves, polarised between a more cosmopolitan and European sense of identity (generally favoured by the young) and a more nationalistic and isolationist (and, in some cases, bellicosely xenophobic) sense held by many in the older generation (abetted by newspapers owned by billionaires with axes to grind and papers to sell). The debates are so bitter and protracted because they concern identity, which is hard to pin down and exists primarily in culture, in the imagination. The contrasting view to the one Anderson discusses is that somehow national identity is in your body, bones or blood. This is implausible, as it implies some mystical biological link between a parcel of land and your genes; of course, you may properly come to love the land, and landscape, you grew up in or inhabit, but this love is not encoded in your DNA. Moreover, this idea has a really horrible history too. The idea that your identity can be ‘summed up’ by some physical characteristic of your body underlies racism. Racism has not always existed; indeed, it came to be a popular idea in the eighteenth century, developed to support the growing colonial expansion of European nations and also to ‘justify’ the unjustifiable evil of slavery. People who still claim to believe this nonsense, that ‘nationality is in the blood’, often do so for very unscrupulous reasons. For example, many of those who were involved in the genocidal ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the Balkans in the 1990s claimed to believe this, stating that, although some people had lived in the same place for generations, they were not ‘really’ from there, lacking this mystical link between soil and blood. Then, having murdered them or chased them away, they took their victims’ possessions and lived in their houses. Our sense of communal identity, then, relies on culture. Famously, the influential critic Raymond Williams (1921–1988) wrote that culture is ‘one

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of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’. The word has at least three different, but interwoven, meanings. The first is personal: to be cultured is to have undergone a process of learning and development (to be, as the founders of English might have phrased it, ‘civilised’). The second meaning refers to culture as ‘high culture’: the great (that is, canonical) works of literature, opera and classical music, for example. The final meaning refers to culture as a word to sum up a much wider array of things: images, objects, pictures, comics, ‘pulp’ literature, religious ceremonies, pop songs, films, clothes, television, soaps, football team histories, traditions and everything else that goes to make up the world we experience. This meaning of culture makes up what Homi Bhabha (a leading contemporary thinker on culture and nationality) calls ‘the scraps, patches, and rags of daily life’, all the made things and invented ideas through which we live and that make up our identity. The culture that creates ‘imagined communities’ is not only what is called ‘high culture’ but, perhaps more importantly, is also culture in this wider sense. National identity is not something that is laid over your personal identity, as if you were a blank canvas with a nationality painted on top. To ask which came first, the personal identity or the national identity, is to ask a chicken-and-egg question. Our sense of national identity plays a central role in constructing us, and it is something we ourselves construct: Bhabha argues that national identity is both pedagogical (taught to us at home, at school, in the community) and performative (performed, acted out and ‘done’ by us in all sorts of ways). Obvious ways of performing your nationality, or acting out a national culture, might include supporting a national sporting team or being involved in a nationwide event such as voting in an election, watching a coronation or royal funeral on TV or celebrating a named national holiday such as Independence Day, Bastille Day, Guy Fawkes Night and so on. Smaller ways might include watching a TV serialisation of a ‘classic of English literature’, visiting a ‘national landmark’ or even handling money, which is stamped with national symbols. All these acts both define you and are examples of you defining yourself. Being taught and studying a subject called not ‘literature’ but ‘English’ is a very significant way of defining and being defined by a national identity. English as cultural heritage One specific example of this is what’s called cultural heritage. The imagined community keeps what it values from its past: tangible things, like stately

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homes, museum exhibits, battlefields and so on, as well as intangible things like stories, attitudes, ideas and beliefs. ‘Heritage’ in this sense is made up of the cultural things that shape the ‘we’ of the imagined community and, significantly, is a version of how the community wants to see itself. (The question this begs, of course, is who decides what is and isn’t ‘heritage’ and why. For example, why are lots of stately homes from the eighteenth century preserved but hardly any workers’ cottages or district poorhouses?) Central to English (the identity and the discipline) are not the places (like Jane Austen’s house) or the material items of cultural heritage (Queen Victoria’s chair, the bed where Elizabeth I slept) but rather the intangible shared stories, attitudes and ideas that ‘everyone should know.’ It is these that make the subject English so crucial for ideas of national identity. Texts – like Shakespeare’s plays or the novels of Charles Dickens – make up a reservoir of tales, ideas, images and values constructing and strengthening the idea of the imagined community. You don’t even have to have read one of Dickens’ novels to be aware what the adjective ‘Dickensian’ means, or to know that a ‘Scrooge’ is a miserly person. Again, this takes for granted the idea that works of literature contain values, messages or morals on which ‘we’ – the imagined community of the English – could all agree. Once ‘we’ have agreed on those, it would then (in principle) be easy to agree on an array of other, possibly more troublesome and more real, issues. However, as I have argued throughout this book, reading is as much about how we look as what we choose to look at. This shared agreement about values, messages or morals is not one that arises from having novels, plays or TV programmes in common or even from admiring the same monuments. It comes from being taught to interpret them in the same way. ‘We’ are still being taught how an ‘English person’ looks at things, in a clear echo of the way the teaching of English developed in India to make people more ‘English’. This means that it isn’t so much a shared knowledge of, for example, Dickens, that is our literary heritage, but rather the way in which we have been taught to understand and interpret Dickens. English as a subject teaches you a way to look at things. In the way it makes you produce essays, projects and ideas, it teaches (and, through assessment and exams, enforces) a way of making you act out this ‘English’ method of looking. English as a subject is a form of cultural heritage, aiming to help create a ‘we’ by making us read and interpret in the same way. Because the subject is compulsory at school and is also highly regarded, it is a particularly strong way to bind people together. This is one of the reasons people find the idea of ‘theory’ quite threatening to culture and national identity. If theory is, as I have argued, a range

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of different ways of looking at things, it means that the ‘English’ way of interpreting literature is no longer unique. ‘Theory’ is seen as a threat not just because it offers new interpretations of texts but also because it offers new ways of looking. New ways of interpreting don’t construct the same ‘we’ as before; in fact, they both teach and produce new forms of communal and national identity. Despite the power of the ‘we’, there is not really any one single culture that everyone inhabits. A single national identity is always the result of a binding together, and the ‘we’ of a national culture is built up by the interaction of lots of different cultures. With very rare exceptions (communities isolated by historical accident or through their own choices, for example), this has always been the case. However, importantly, the modern world is characterised by even more interaction between cultures than ever before – the process of ‘globalisation’. We now inhabit an even more hybrid society where different cultural traditions, ideas and assumptions try to live together. They might all share a nation, but people brought up in different places, either within or outside the national boundaries, people brought up in different classes or in different ethnicities or with different religions or expectations, have, to a greater or lesser degree, different cultures. On the one hand, it’s naïve to think that this is unproblematic; this brings difficulties, stresses and problems. On the other hand, it’s short-sighted and tendentious to be angry about this ‘multicultural’ mixing (and sad, perhaps, to fear it) because of the benefits it brings. Salman Rushdie (b. 1947) is a novelist whose work has explored the positive and negative impact of migration and mixing; he is not blind to the challenges but wrote that his work celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformations that come of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs ... Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. Rather than insisting on a single imaginary ‘culture’, it is more accurate to discuss the mixing of an array of cultures in an ongoing conversation of ­cultures. And, if different cultures are mixing and conversing more and more, this means, most importantly, that different ways of understanding and thinking about texts must also emerge and mix. The sense of ‘we’ is changing. The study of literature and language is an opportunity to understand and to encourage an even more open multicultural society. As I suggested in Chapter 6, the curriculum we study has not one

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canon but many different canons by different writers: it now includes books by writers like Maya Angelou (b. 1928), Alice Walker (b. 1944), Anita Desai (b. 1937) and Chinua Achebe (b. 1930) – writers from outside the conventional canon and outside ‘England’. However, these texts are often still studied in the same, traditional way. What needs to change is the way we look at texts – new ways of looking, new ways of doing. This discipline, perhaps more than any other, with its strange mix of literature, language, identity and tradition, is a crucible in which new versions of identities are being formed and understood. Through ‘doing English’, we understand ourselves and our identities afresh. Why has English been a political battleground? With all this at stake, it’s no wonder that politicians, teachers, academics, journalists and others argue so much over the subject of English. English, as both a popular and compulsory school subject, is where many people encounter first a structured approach to cultural issues, and cultural activity, especially education, plays a large role in shaping our views about the world. Studying literature, as a part of culture in general, is a very powerful way of forming people, not least because it is there, most often and most clearly, that people’s experience is represented. So, when people seek to shape ideas, to convince others and to make changes in society, the subject of English is one of the tools to which they turn. This process of shaping and moulding has become even more important because we live in an age of mass communication, where the way we represent things and ‘soft power’ has become much more significant. English is also controversial because it is in many respects one of the most important subjects in education. This is not because knowledge about Shakespeare, for example, is more important than being able to do maths (because it isn’t), but more simply because English teaches literacy and the interpretative skills on which the other subjects are based. It provides materials and abilities that support a range of different disciplines. This key role means that if anybody – politicians, teachers, academics or the media – tries to change the education system as a whole, they must turn first to English. As a result, English becomes both a ‘test tube’ for education policy and a ‘weathervane’, showing which ideas are strongest at any time in education as a whole. This helps explain why those interested in education react very strongly to any proposed changes to English courses. But this power is not all ‘one way’. Precisely because literature and its study relies on argument, feeling and values, as politics does, doing English

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is a way of actively responding to the world. This might include analysing political discourse, uncovering political subtexts in works of culture or in the realm of ideas. For example, the critic Lauren Berlant (b. 1957) shows how making people believe that there is something positive coming, or that they can take back control, is often what she calls ‘cruel optimism’, selling a sort of positivity and good feeling in defiance of the actual conditions of people’s lives and against their own interests. Nationalist politics is a prime example, wherein the goodwill felt towards people’s own imagined community is used to distract them from wider issues or more complex and deeper problems. Politics can be about ‘feeling’ or (more technically) ‘affect’ (not just feelings, but how words, music, our environment generally makes us feel). The study of literature is one place where feelings, their construction, use and discussion is centrally important. Doing English, then, makes us sensitive to ‘how we get along’, to the polis. To do English is to become involved with others through literature and language. It leads you to uncover ideas other than your own and new ways of thinking about things. We might think of reading as a private, solitary activity, but all the time it is forming links between you and others in the world. Reading by yourself is, in fact, one of the most social, political activities you can do. Summary ·· Politics can be defined in its broadest sense as ‘how we get along’. Both literature and political speech are in language; both deal with argument, feelings and values; both are concerned with ideas about society and our place in the world. The two are inextricably linked. ·· Those who support extrinsic forms of criticism suggest that texts are about the world, and that English is a form of ‘cultural politics’, a point where politics and culture are interwoven. Those who support intrinsic criticism would disagree with this but still acknowledge the link between literature and how we see our place in the world. ·· Crucially, English is intimately involved with questions about identity because identity is constructed culturally. ·· Communities exist in the imagination, built upon by a shared stock of images, ideas, stories and traditions. We are all both the objects created by cultural identity and the subjects who, in turn, create it. ·· Those cultural things from the past that are chosen to shape the ‘we’ of the imagined community make up a cultural heritage. Traditionally,

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English, the subject, is a form of cultural heritage, both in the texts it chooses (the canon) and in the way it interprets those texts. ·· English is a site of controversy because it is an inherently political ­subject. Issues of representation within English courses are increasingly seen as important in the wider world, so the subject is a focus for those interested in such issues. In addition to this, the interpretative skills taught in English are at the base of all other subjects, so anyone wishing to change education must engage with English.

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13 Why study English?

·· ·· ·· ··

Why do English at university? Is English useful? Is English valuable? What skills does it involve?

Why do English? The quick answer is because it’s great, plus it gives you skills. I wouldn’t be writing this book if I thought English wasn’t worthwhile, but as I’ve said throughout, everything about English is contentious, even – perhaps most especially – the question of why someone might choose to study it. Students give all sorts of good reasons for wanting to study English: because reading is pleasurable and fun; because it’s interesting; because it allows them to experience a huge range of thoughts and feelings; because they like way it’s usually taught, through conversation; because works of literature mean things to them. And all these reasons combine to make many English students noticeably more enthusiastic about their subject. This is especially gratifying to English teachers and academics because there is supposed to be a so-called ‘crisis of the humanities’. Many of the traditional arts and humanities subjects, centrally English, are said to be in decline (although the figures are not that clear). The humanities are, however, often under attack as people with other agendas try to push them aside for economic or

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other reasons. In contrast to science, technology, engineering and maths, the STEM subjects, what use is English? What skills does it teach? Is it vocational? Is it useful? But this is English: of course, even asking if the subject is ‘useful’ is contentious. What’s the use of ‘use’? Should we think of English as useful or not? Usually this debate is cast in terms of thinking of education as ‘instrumental’, that is, as a tool for doing something. This is often liked to utilitarianism. This philosophy, most clearly expounded by British thinker Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), argues that the only thing that matters is only how useful something is. For its use in making people happy, Bentham wrote, ‘the game of push-pin [a child’s or bar game involving pushing pins – the equivalent of one of those simple but gripping game apps on your phone] is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry’. (As you can imagine, Bentham was one F. R. Leavis’s hate figures). For people who are interested only in how useful something is or how it can make money, English at first doesn’t look very beneficial for the individual, the economy, the community or the nation. Against this, some argue that literature and arts are special, and even though, of course, literature is used in some ways (Shakespeare made a living from his plays), there’s something about it that is simply greater than its use value – a literary text isn’t simply a tool for doing something else but is innately significant in itself. Moreover, to think of literature instrumentally is to betray precisely the beauty, passion, interest, love and self-understanding that students (and teachers!) feel in literature; we don’t measure the people we love by their use, after all. The study of literature is simply a good and important activity in its own right. Further, some argue that to reduce literature to its use is to turn literature and its study simply into another sort of commodity, like a cup of coffee or pair of jeans, which can be traded and exchanged for cash or social kudos (so-called ‘cultural capital’). This implies that literary understanding can simply be bought and doesn’t have to be learned through a process of reading, thought and reflection. (As a comparison, rich people might be able to afford the best clothes or coffee easily, but, although they can buy the time to exercise, to get fit they still have to sweat and strain like everybody else; perhaps that’s a closer analogy to coming to understand literary texts.) Thinking of education as a tool can also have some odd side effects. ‘To a man with a hammer,’ the old saying goes, ‘everything looks like a nail’;

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academic enquiry is supposed to be disinterested. This doesn’t mean it’s ­boring but rather that it does not serve any particular interests; a lawyer, for example, might read a case report with the interests of their client foremost in mind. If one reads a text with too limited a range of questions in one’s mind, like the hotel guest reading Macbeth in Chapter 6, texts can begin to look limited. To read a text just for what’s in the exam is to misunderstand something vital (and would miss, ironically, what’s crucial for doing well in the assessment: reading and thinking as a critic). Is it possible to be totally ‘disinterested’? (What do you think?) Focusing on one’s presuppositions or on how interpretations are shaped are ways of coming to be aware what (often unacknowledged) interests are. The values of English Some other thinkers focus on not on the use but on the value of the humanities and the study of literature. Helen Small sums up some of these views. She says that, in the face of demands simply to be useful or to fall in with what ‘we all need,’ the study of the humanities, including literature, remains a valuable place in which individuality and personal distinctiveness can flourish. Moreover, this sort of study ‘assists in the preservation and curation of the culture, and of the skills for interpreting and reinterpreting that culture to meet the needs and interests of the present’. The humanities also make a ‘vital contribution to individual happiness and to the happiness of large groups’ in ways that are not simply economic or instrumental. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum takes some of these arguments further. The study of humanities subjects, she argues, is vital for democracy. Democracies have great rational and imaginative powers. They are also prone to some serious flaws in reasoning, to parochialism, haste, sloppiness, selfishness, narrowness of spirit. Education, based mainly on profitability in the global market magnifies these deficiencies, producing a greedy obtuseness and a technically trained docility that threaten the very life of democracy itself, and that certainly impede the creation of a decent world culture. For Nussbaum, the humanities are vital to make democracy function properly and to live up to its promise. Education should not be based on what makes most money. Citizens need factual knowledge but also, crucially, the more complex ability to assess and weigh up that knowledge; citizens need to

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follow, understand, judge and make arguments – to think critically; citizens need to have what she calls ‘narrative imagination’ – the ability to see sympathetically and flexibly, as far as possible, from other people’s point of view; and citizens need to have the fullest sense of the importance and value of each of person across the world. (Notice Nussbaum too is using a version of the logos–pathos–ethos trio described in Chapter 12). This is good for business too: she writes that leading ‘business educators have long understood that a developed capacity to imagine is a keystone of a healthy business culture. Innovation requires minds that are flexible, open and creative; literature and the arts cultivate those capacities’. (Successful businesspeople will tell you that you don’t know where the next good idea is going to come from. Perhaps the most famous English professor in the world is J. R. R. Tolkien (1892– 1973), who studied and taught the relatively obscure area of Anglo-Saxon verse. His stories – centrally The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, informed and shaped by that research – have made billions for the publishing, film and gaming industries and have created many thousands of jobs). For Nussbaum, it is through the humanities that the crucial virtues of democracy are most effectively learned. How those virtues might change over time is part of our constant dialogue about humanity’s ever-changing self-understanding; terms like truth, sincerity and virtue are part of the dialogue. This sounds noble and true, but it’s often hard to remember with an essay due in on Thursday and an exam at the end of term (or with 25 essays to mark and a lecture to write). Students of English love literature, and they also (usually!) want to do well in assessments and learn useful skills. While some people oppose these two – a love for the subject and all it can do; and qualifications and skills – I don’t think that they are a really in conflict. Education at its best is a holistic process in which the different parts are connected in the light of a whole. And, as the American critic Louis Menand puts it, ‘knowledge just is instrumental: it puts us into a different relationship with the world’. He goes on to make the old joke that ‘Garbage is garbage but the history of garbage is scholarship’ and adds, ‘Accounting is a trade but the history of accounting is a subject of disinterested inquiry – a liberal art. And the accountant who knows something about the history of accounting will be a better accountant. That knowledge pays off in the marketplace’. But why should knowing about the history and philosophy of accountancy – rather than just knowing the rules and procedures – make one a better accountant? The main reason is that, like every complex human activity, accountancy is constantly changing and developing as new ideas, practices

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and technologies, as well as theoretical arguments about its nature, shape how it’s done and its relationship to business and society as a whole. Accountancy is a conversation too. Understanding the principles of accounting, along with some of the struggles and controversies that have made up its history and applications, means one is better prepared to judge what is important in new or different situations and to assess the meaning of complex changes, as well as understanding its evolving role. A good accountant has learned the discipline, the disciplinary consciousness, of accountancy. Accountants learn by reviewing case studies and following financial and legal discussions and protocols; English students learn theirs (more delightfully, in my opinion) by reading and discussing novels, poems, plays, other texts and works of criticism and theory. Importantly, learning one disciplinary consciousness makes it much easier to learn another; knowing what it is to master a subject means you judge better what you do or do not know and what you need to do to master another field. This is crucial in learning how to learn. And perhaps in English, this process can be made very clear, precisely because it is such a self-reflexive discipline where the controversies mean that the disciplinary consciousness is continually brought to the fore. ‘My degree taught me skills?’ Ideally these two strands of education – its values and its instrumental, ­practical use – run holistically together, as I’ve said. So, having discussed values, I want to turn to some of the skills that English as a discipline teaches. For many in English, even to talk of skills is to betray the subject, and it does feel uncongenial to discuss the experience of reading in this way. But in a discussion of doing English, it’s important. A student of mine was applying for a graduate job in a major publishing firm and asked me to look over her CV. It mentioned her degree in only one line but spent a page listing the skills she had learned during her demanding part-time job working in a pub. I asked her if the publisher would be more interested in those skills or the skills she had learned from her degree in English. ‘My degree taught me skills?’ she asked, looking at me blankly. She wasn’t to blame; we were, for not making plain the skills she was learning. English as a subject has always been bad at discussing the business end of what it teaches and its link to employment. Perhaps it is too keen to stress the other benefits – moral, communal, intellectual – of an education in the humanities or the enjoyment found in reading and discussing works of literature. But English as a subject does teach real skills and can and should be more explicit about them. In an article called

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‘Fear of Being Useful’ (2012), Paul Jay and Gerald Graff quote the boss of a major US insurance firm: [O]ur employment exam does not test applicants on their knowledge of finance or the insurance business, but it does require them to demonstrate critical thinking skills … the ability to read for information, to communicate and write effectively, and to have an understanding of global integration. Generally, and as information becomes more and more easily accessible, employers are valuing the critical thinking, imagination and creative flexibility of English graduates. However important skills are, lists of skills are tendentious (one asks, ‘Do I have all of them? How good am I at them?’). They can also be boring to read and can encourage a tick-box attitude. However, in part to put these on record, I am going to provide a list here. The government’s Quality Assurance Agency produced a document, written for the most part by academics and business people, that recorded among other things what sorts of skills and knowledge an English graduate should have. I quote here liberally from that short document – you can view it in full online – but more as an illustration of the sorts of skills involved than a definitive list. First, there is the subject knowledge you learn from English. This involves knowing about a range of literature and ideas – an awareness of how culture, language, technology, economics, gender, race, body and many other factors can affect how, where and by whom texts are produced, received, understood and appreciated. It also involves understanding the role of readers in shaping texts; the relationships between different genres and different media; critical, theoretical, linguistic and stylistic concepts and terminology; form and its importance; and, through following works of literature, understanding and analysing debates, arguments and ideas over time. There are also skills specific to English. People who have studied English can read closely and critically, paying attention to the details of texts. They can analyse texts and discourses, respond to the affective power of language, using appropriate approaches and terminology. Crucially, they develop independent and imaginative interpretations of literary, critical, linguistic or creative material and can articulate a critical understanding of complex texts and ideas (and of their historical relations). They can write clearly, accurately and effectively and apply scholarly bibliographic skills appropriate to the subject.

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There are also generic and graduate skills. English graduates are effective researchers, good communicators and active learners. As effective researchers, they can discover and synthesise complex information and diverse evidence and respond creatively and imaginatively to research tasks. They can initiate projects of their own. English graduates can present information within wider contexts; test, interpret and analyse information and evidence independently and critically, producing from that analysis cogent arguments and decisive judgements and plans; and organise and report by the deadline. As good communicators, they possess advanced communication skills and are able to articulate their own and other people’s ideas concisely, accurately and persuasively, both orally and in writing. They can develop working relationships with others in teams, especially through constructive dialogue (for example, by listening, asking and responding to questions). They understand the role of narrative and emotion in decision making and can be sensitive to cultural contexts when working with others. And as active, lifelong learners, people who have studied English can adapt to different demands and tasks; appreciate the benefit of giving and receiving feedback; evaluate and reflect on their own practices and assumptions; look beyond the immediate task to the wider context, including the social and commercial effects of their work; and initiate and take responsibility for their own work. In the informationrich age, learning how to learn is central, and English, with its insistence on self-reflection, is a superb discipline to undertake that. Put like this, the skills seem rather overwhelming, but, of course, these skills are holistic and are learned together. Athletes train in several different ways in different sessions because they know that different forms of exercise build different strengths and skills together. They don’t, for example, spend weeks just building up their upper body strength while ignoring their stamina and legs. Moreover, learning is a cumulative process; you are involved in the process of learning these skills, and nobody expects you to have them all immediately. Ideally, these skills are embedded in the course you are studying. When you write an essay, for example, you are improving your subject knowledge of a period or writer, understanding how that text, say, fits into a history or aesthetic movement or debate. You are using and improving your critical, theoretical, linguistic and stylistic concepts and use of terminology. And you are also working on your subject skills: reading closely; analysing and responding to text; writing clearly, accurately and effectively; and discovering what complex ideas and debates are like. Writing an essay means uncovering information and bringing it together, coming to develop your own opinions and ideas, following up on things that you have found

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interesting, thinking things over and weighing them up and then explaining what it is you think and why. It also means taking feedback and responding to it to improve your future performance. In class and in seminars, you develop knowledge by listening and discussing texts and ideas in their historical, cultural and intellectual contexts, looking at the creative, cultural and intellectual forces active in shaping them, their reception, the contemporary debates they may be involved in, their use of language, their form and their genre. This focuses your attention on issues and texts, providing techniques for analyses and heightening your sensitivity to language and contexts. It will help you assess the relevance of your research and ideas, use evidence, make constructive comparisons and contrasts, understand the place of both detail on the one hand and overarching structures and designs on the other and judge the appropriate level of detail. It will also develop your understanding of the terms, procedures, process, content and style of others’ arguments, which in turn leads to the effective use of the terms, procedures, process, content and style of argument yourself. Seminars will help you draw conclusions, follow both lateral and logical inferences, evaluate and judge arguments and question your own and others’ assumptions and presuppositions. Finally, seminars develop your communication skills through presenting prepared work to peers and assessors, through thinking on your feet by responding to questions, through following discussions and engaging in dialogue, group discussions and group reporting and through questioning peers and staff. Through learning how to respond effectively to tasks, questioning peers and staff, reflecting on your own practices, thinking independently, participating in teamwork and cooperation situations and developing self-discipline, both intellectual and social, you also learn how to learn. Conclusion Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586) argued that the work of the poet, more than the historian or moral philosopher, educates ‘the mind more effectually than any other art doth’ because it teaches with the ‘hand of delight’: it’s great, plus skills. It might be right to stress the anti-instrumental side to studying English, how the discipline interrogates the idea of ‘usefulness’ and how it champions values; and yet even doing this helps foster vital critical skills that empower students. These two sides (delight/skills) can’t really be separated from each other because they are part of the holistic experience of studying. In English, perhaps it’s possible, as my friend Simon says, ‘to jump

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through the hoops you have to jump through by doing the things you want to do anyway’. We can see it from the other point of view too: if English students and their teachers do look to more vocational disciplines in envy or in pity, thinking them imprisoned by the need to be useful, do we think that those studying STEM subjects don’t ever wonder, in a far from instrumental way, at the beauty of the universe, the intricacies of materials or the mysteries of mathematics? Summary ·· In the arts and humanities and in English, the question of use is controversial. Some argue that to look at the subject focusing on its benefits to the economy or the state is mistaken, and that the study of literature is simply a good thing in its own right. ·· Others stress the values of English: it helps foster individuality and preserves cultures. ·· It may also play a key role in a democracy, in teaching citizens to assess information, to make and judge arguments, to think critically and understand one another better and with more sympathy. ·· The study of literature also teaches skills, and its graduates are effective researchers, good communicators and active learners. ·· These skills are ideally holistically embedded in courses you take.

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Conclusion The importance of English

This book is about why and how we do English. It is a book about ideas and has explained what you are doing when you are doing English. The book has covered some key ideas for English today. Many of the ideas I have described affect your assessment, exams, aims, objectives and everything else to do with English, usually without your knowing. I think it’s important to see how and why things are done the way they are. (Ben Knights and Chris Thurgar-Dawson write suggestively that the ‘history of a discipline is, among other things, a covert history of the relation between the culture of the staff tribe and that of the student tribe’; part of the point of this book has been to uncover this secret history, to look ‘backstage’.) This is not least because, if you know why you are doing something, it makes it much more straightforward to do it. As you progress in English, you will realise that I have simplified ideas and issues from time to time; because it’s often assumed that everything you do in English should be naturally accessible, simplification is frowned on. But again, this book is a tool or, to use a famous metaphor from Ludwig Wittgenstein, a ladder to be thrown away after use. (You might begin the process of throwing it away by thinking about what’s wrong with the model of reading presented in Chapter 3.) I have no control over how anything in this book might be interpreted; what you make of it is up to you. But isn’t that the case with every text? I have suggested that English is changing. It used to be the case that in order to succeed in the study of literature, students had to learn to look through one set of eyes, eyes that were perhaps very different from their own.

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In doing so, they accepted, often without realising it, the worldview behind the discipline that was developed as a subject in the middle of the twentieth century. Among other things, this turned potentially exciting literature into bland exam fodder. All this risked making English into a ‘heritage’ subject that was studied as an insipid ritual and that ran roughshod over the fact that students at all levels come from different backgrounds, have different formative experiences and bring different presuppositions. The situation has changed, however, and one sign of this change is the wider diffusion of new ideas and innovative ways of looking at literature, often through what is called theory. Theory isn’t just an arbitrary collection of names and jargon. Theory – as I’ve said, not a good term – stands for the new questions that readers ask of literary texts that weren’t asked before (and so it reveals that older approaches have particular questions that they ask and issues that they pursue). We ask new questions because the world has changed and the need for new ways of thinking about it stems from that change. For example, we read feminist theory and criticism not to play at being feminists; we read them because there are important questions to be asked about women’s roles and lives and about gender issues. We explore the relationship between literature and the environment because literature helps us focus on and understand our relationships with the ecosystems we inhabit. And we discuss global literature because we all inhabit a globalised world and because how we understand and live with the consequences of this is crucial, as events all over the world clearly show. English – including theory – is not an abstract glass bead game played only for pleasure; it is a discipline that, through the study of literature, attempts to comprehend better the world around us and to appreciate the others who inhabit it. How we read is part of how we are in the world we share, and questions about this arise from reading texts. Our reading and interpretation grows out of our experiences, concerns and hopes for ourselves and others. This book, then, has sought to look at some ideas that shape the study of literature today; to answer the question, ‘Why are we doing this?’ To summarise: ·· Reading is an active interpretation, and English deals with texts and how we read. Once we are aware of different ways of interpreting texts, it becomes clear that there is no neutral, objective approach to literature. In turn, this means that there could be no single method of studying English, new or traditional, and no single correct interpretation. I feel that we should watch out for replacing ‘one way’ simply with ‘another way’.

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English is a pluralist subject (it accepts a wide range of approaches) and is open-ended. • Like all disciplines, English has a disciplinary consciousness; to study English means to learn to think as a literary critic. This involves not only knowing about literary and other texts but also understanding debates and ideas about what literature is, different forms of interpretation, literary value, the canon, authorship, the uses of language, narrative and other matters. English has a complex history that still shapes its current practices. • English, as culture and as a subject that studies culture, is involved with our relationships with others and with the world. Culture is woven inextricably into how we get along and has far-reaching effects in the wider world. A consequence of this is that English is not just about texts but also about you, about others and about the nature of society. It also means English is a very controversial subject. ·· English, like all disciplines, is constantly evolving and changing, drawing on new ideas, following internal debates to new conclusions and reflecting society. None of this is to argue that ‘anything goes’ in English. Looking at texts, interpretation and a wide range of significant ideas, then relating this to our cultures and societies, involves knowledge and careful thought. Perhaps most of all, it involves constantly taking responsibility for each interpretation. English also asks, ‘Why do you think that about the text?’ Nearly all education has two strands to it. One is about learning skills and facts for their own sake, proving you have them by passing exams and getting a qualification, which in turn opens doors. The other side to education seems less concrete but is, in a way, closer to each of us: it is about fulfilling your own potential, following your own interests, exploring yourself and others, your society, the world, and becoming – often in some indefinable way – better. But just because these aims sound vague and you couldn’t be assessed on them does not mean that they are not valuable. In fact, some might say that these are truly the point of education. Nearly 40 years ago, the educationalist Harold Rosen (1919–2008) stressed precisely this side of the subject of English: [It is] nothing less than a different model of education: knowledge to be made, not given; knowledge comprising more than can be discursively stated; learning as a diverse range of processes, including affective ones; educational processes to be embarked on with outcomes

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unpredictable; students’ perceptions, experiences, imaginings and unsystematically acquired knowledge admitted as legitimate curricular content. This is stirring and right: I drew on these ideas explicitly in Chapter 1. But there are exams, too. Sometimes the assessment and fulfilment sides of education run together, and the whole process can be a joy. Sometimes, they don’t, and getting the ‘right answer’ kills off some of the very real interest. Theory, with its concern to offer different ideas and different voices and to validate different approaches, is, among other things, part of an attempt to bring these two sides together. Moreover, if some aspects of the history of English now look dubious to us – subtly coercing people – there is a link between the study of literature and ethical responsibility. The world is comprised of many different value systems and beliefs, which orient how people think about themselves and others – roughly, how they make sense of things. Some of these are growing, some are declining, but they are all interacting with each other. If we choose a system by which to orientate ourselves – a set of political or religious beliefs or a philosophical approach to the world – we have usually actively chosen it rather than just simply accepted it, as people in the past might have done. The result of this is that each of us is more responsible in two ways. First, decisions, especially decisions about doing the right thing, have to be argued and negotiated for, within oneself and with others, even though there may be no absolute sure-fire way of proving them ‘correct’. Each of us is responsible for these decisions. Second, and because of this, we have to be sensitive enough to respond to each situation and each choice as best we can. This involves not just viewing the situation as fully as we are able but also reflecting on the ideas and approaches that led to that particular interpretation. And English as a subject has a role to play here, in making us more reflective and responsive. The conflict between these value systems makes some people afraid, and this in turn leads them to refuse to take up their responsibility; they might simply decide to follow a strong leader or glitzy politician. This too means they often refuse, or dare not, respond to other people who do not share their nationality, religion or political views, or some other characteristic; this refusal to respond is itself a choice, of course. Literature and its study, calling for responsibility and response, sets itself against these attitudes and encourages us to be our better selves. Some people argue that literature shows us other people’s experience or that it teaches us to ‘walk a mile in somebody else’s shoes’; I mentioned one

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example in the last chapter, Martha Nussbaum’s idea of narrative imagination. This experience, they suggest, makes us more responsive to other people’s needs, ideas, hopes and fears. The trouble with this idea is that, even after reading a book or poem that does this (and, of course, not all do or are interpreted as doing so), it is still possible to forget or to assume that this one story is only a story. Walking a mile in somebody’s shoes is walking only a mile, and a sensitivity can soon become callused again. Our responsiveness is perhaps better developed by thinking about how we read. By understanding different presuppositions and by uncovering what we take for granted, it is possible to develop a habit of constantly questioning whatever you read or see or think or do. This constant questioning in turn develops a heightened responsiveness. You, as a reader and student of English, should be free to explore many methods of interpretation, or to hop from one to the other, or to experiment with a selection. This makes us better readers. By consciously seeking out and using different methods of interpretation, motivated by presuppositions different from our own, each of us can bring to light, learn about and, perhaps, challenge our own preconceived ideas. This not only leads to ideas about works of literature that are new, interesting and exciting in themselves but also helps us to see the world differently. In this way, the power of literature can continue to unsettle us and make us question even our most closely held beliefs, not only about art but also about ourselves, others, society and the wider world. Literature lets voices, feelings, ideas be heard; and, in contrast to those, often tyrants, who would make us believe that there is only one right answer, theirs, and who would have us follow that one answer to the vicious detriment of other people, the study of literature calls us to a fruitful and human listening and dialogue. The philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) celebrated what she called ‘natality’, the interruption into life of birth. She goes on: [The] new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting. In this sense of initiative, an element of action, and therefore of natality, is inherent in all human activities. Indeed, it is this possibility of unpredictable newness, fully experienced, that bestows ‘faith and hope upon human affairs’. And it is this sense of

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‘unpredictable newness’, really, in that part of ‘human affairs’ that involves literature, its reading, writing and interpretation, that this book has been about. English is a contested and constantly evolving discipline; even the name of what you learn in the subject is disputed (although, as I said in the introduction, I like the suggestion of some year 12s that it makes you an ‘Englisher’, that is, a dynamic participant). New ideas, new books, poems and plays, new ways of reading and writing and the new demands these make create its unpredictable newness. No one knows what will happen next, and we have to strive to be open to what we can’t yet know. This means that the future – of the subject, of how we understand literature, of literary creation – lies with you, the active reader, now, doing English.

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Further reading

They say that students, teachers and academics are just the reproductive system of libraries – after all, each one recreates a little library. If this is true, then the DNA of libraries is encoded in bibliographies. A bibliography serves two purposes: to show where the ideas you have been reading about came from and to provide a list of further things to read. This bibliography aims mainly to serve the second of these purposes (though all the critical works I have cited are mentioned here). It offers a ‘first port of call’ for what to read next. 1  Studying English It’s hard to find a book that sums up English. American author David Foster Wallace (1962–2008), in a piece widely available online, puts it like this: ‘Critical appreciation’ means having smart, sophisticated reasons for liking whatever literature you like, and being able to articulate those reasons for other people, especially in writing. Vital for critical appreciation is the ability to ‘interpret’ a piece of literature, which basically means coming up with a cogent, interesting account of what a piece of lit means, what it’s trying to do to/for the reader, what technical choices the author’s made in order to achieve the effects she wants and so on. As you can probably anticipate, the whole thing gets very complicated and abstract and hard, which is one reason why entire college departments are devoted to studying and interpreting literature.

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The book by John Hattie is Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning (London: Routledge, 2011). A great ‘hands-on’ practical introduction for students is Andrew Green, Starting an English Literature Degree (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). From a teaching perspective, Ben Knight’s Pedagogic Criticism: Reconfiguring University English Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017) is an outstanding account of the subject and its dynamics. 2  Where did English come from? There is a growing number of books on the history and origins of English as a subject. For this chapter, these were especially useful: ·· Carol Atherton, Defining Literary Criticism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005) • Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848–1932 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) • Stefan Collini, What Are Universities For? (London: Penguin, 2012) • Brian Doyle, English and Englishness (London: Routledge, 1989) • Michael Gardiner, The Constitution of English Literature: The State, the Nation and the Canon (London: Bloomsbury, 2013) • Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007) • Gerald Graff and Michael Warner (eds), The Origins of Literary Studies in America, (London: Routledge, 1989) • Geoffrey Galt Harpham, The Humanities and the Dream of America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) • Alexandra Lawrie, The Beginnings of University English: Extramural Study 1885–1910 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) • Louis Menard, The Marketplace of Ideas (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010) • James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014) • Ted Underwood, Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013) ·· Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989)

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E. M. W. Tillyard offers a personal account of the development of the subject in The Muse Unchained (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1958), and Bernard Bergonzi’s book, Exploding English: Criticism, Theory and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) is an entertaining, polemical, personal history of English from the 1950s to the 1980s. Henry Nettleship’s pamphlet is The Study of Modern European Languages and Literatures in the University of Oxford (Oxford: Parker, 1887). Other documents in relation to this, including selections from the Newbolt Report and Collins, can be found in: Writing Englishness 1900–1950, edited by Judy Giles and Tim Middleton (London: Routledge, 1995) and The Origins of Literary Studies in America, edited by Gerald Graff and Michael Warner (London: Routledge, 1989). There is also a great deal of material on the Leavises, including a very good biography by Ian MacKillop, F. R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism (London: Penguin, 1997), and studies by: ·· Michael Bell, F. R. Leavis (London: Routledge, 1988) • Gary Day, Re-reading Leavis: Culture and Literary Criticism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996) • Francis Mulhern, The Moment of Scrutiny (London: New Left Books, 1979) ·· Anne Samson, F. R. Leavis (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992) The chapter on Leavis by Simon During, called ‘When literary criticism mattered’ in Rónán McDonald’s edited collection The Value of Literary Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) is excellent, and there is now an active Leavis Society, at http://leavissociety.com/. Leavis’s texts are well worth dipping into. Not only are they historically interesting, but also they often make extremely acute critical points and are excellent examples of close reading. The most interesting include: F. R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), Revaluation (1936), The Common Pursuit (1952), The Great Tradition (1948) and The Living Principle (1975). Most of these have been reprinted recently by Penguin. In the same vein, I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), originally published in 1929, is perhaps the seminal book in the development of close reading. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Penguin, 1995), originally published in 1930, is a masterpiece of this genre and Michael Wood’s On Empson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017) is a magical gem of a book; and Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (London: University of Chicago Press, 1961), is also extremely accessible. John William’s novel is Stoner (London: Vintage, 2012).

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Other texts, interesting for themselves as well as being key for the d­ evelopment of English, are Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, edited by J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960); and T. S. Eliot’s influential essays, including ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ in his Selected Prose, edited by Frank Kermode (London: Faber and Faber, 1975). A really clear, fair and up-to-date summary is by Barbara Herrnstein Smith, ‘What Was “Close Reading”? A Century of Method in Literary Studies’ Minnesota Review 87 (2016), 57–75. 3  Studying English today There are a number of introductions to ‘literary theory’ and English today. These are among the best: ·· Andrew Bennet and Nicholas Royle, This Thing Called Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing (New York: Routledge, 2014) is a very interesting, innovative introduction to key critical concepts. • Peter Barry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009) • Sara Upstone, Literary Theory: A Complete Introduction (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2017) • Vincent Leitch’s Literary Criticism in the 21st Century (New York, Bloomsbury 2014) is not a guide per se but does introduce much in the current state. There are two large anthologies of theory: ·· The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (Second Edition) Vincent B. Leitch, and William E. Cain, Laurie A. Finke, Barbara E. Johnson, John McGowan, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Jeffrey J. Williams (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010) ·· Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (eds), Literary Theory: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009) And a useful glossary: ·· M. H. Abrams, Geoffrey Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 9th Edition (Boston: Wadsworth, 2009)

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Other introductions include: ·· David Ayres, Literary Theory: A Reintroduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008) • Hans Bertens, Literary Theory: The Basics (London: Routledge, 2001) • Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) • Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory, 3rd edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008) ·· M. A. R. Habib, Modern Literary Criticism and Theory: A History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008) Ludwig Wittgenstein’s metaphor is from Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963). Two recent polemical books with much to say are ·· Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: Chicago University Press 2015) ·· Deidra Shauna Lynch, Loving Literature: A Cultural History (Chicago: Chicago University Press 2015) A very useful resource for students is emagazine, published by the wonderful English and Media Centre (www.englishandmedia.co.uk). The magazine has very readable articles that cover the whole of English and use a wide range of critical approaches. 4  The discipline of English English is one of the most-discussed subjects in the curriculum, and many books discuss its pedagogy. Sections of this chapter draw heavily upon Patrick Scott’s excellent (but now a bit dated) book about English in the United Kingdom, Reconstructing A-level English (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1989). I was very pleased to cite from Kathryn Jamshidi, and the link is here: https://studyingfiction.com/2016/12/15/youre-an-english-student-whodoesnt-read-by-egh324-student-kathryn-jamshidi/ ‘Manufactured reading’ comes from M. Giovanelli and J. Mason, ‘‘Well I don’t feel that’: Schemas, worlds and authentic reading in the classroom’, English in Education, 49(1): 41–55 (2015). This chapter is also influenced by the work of Ben Knights, including his ‘Intelligence and Interrogation: The Identity of the English Student’,

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Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 4 (1), 33–52 (2005). Rónán McDonald, The Death of the Critic (London: Continuum, 2008), is also worth reading on these matters. The brief discussion of tradition is influenced by Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (London: Duckworth, 1985), p. 221–222. In his book Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), Chad Wellmon discusses the ways disciplines develop. In an interview with Scott Jaschik (in Inside Higher Ed., May 8, 2015) he writes that ‘knowledge was not some ready-made thing that dutiful scholars simply collected and displayed in printed tomes of erudition’. He goes on: Knowledge was a problem that could never fully be solved. As opposed to mere “facts”… knowledge had to be crafted, shared and cultivated over time. It required research, not simply erudition…. This ethic came to be embodied in the ideal of what I term the disciplinary self and its distinct virtues: industriousness, attention to detail, a critical disposition and a commitment to the collaborative development of knowledge. This means, he argues, that disciplines aren’t just abstract taxonomies of knowledge. They are formative practices. Disciplines don’t just organise ideas and concepts; they form particular types of people. They entail institutional and social practices and an underlying ethos aimed at producing a certain type of person who can then produce a certain type of knowledge… disciplines are embodied as opposed to simply theoretical forms of knowledge. If we think of disciplines as traditions, then we’re immediately dealing with questions of authority, transmission, language, concepts and, especially, critique. Traditions are never univocal or monolithic. Disciplines are defined by perpetual internal conflict about what belongs and what doesn’t, what is relevant for today and the future. The boundaries and standards of disciplines are highly flexible and are constantly being redrawn and rearticulated. This is another way of thinking through ‘disciplinary consciousness’.

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5  Critical attitudes René Wellek and Austin Warren’s ideas about intrinsic and extrinsic are developed in Theory of Literature, 3rd edition (Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1963), one of the most famous New Critical discussions of what literature is. 6  Literature, value and the canon The question ‘What is literature?’ has exercised writers, critics and philosophers for a very long time. Places to start might be: ·· Aristotle’s Poetics is short and straightforward. Try it, you’ll be surprised. More recent attempts to answer the question include René Wellek and Austin Warren’s Theory of Literature (see above, under Chapter 4), where they outline their understanding of the issues. Derek Attridge’s excellent and clear The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge 2004) offers a very interesting and innovative account of the literary. Jonathan Culler outlines a very different answer in his Structuralist Poetics (1975). There is a challenging, but fairly accessible, discussion of literature by Jacques Derrida, one of the most influential contemporary thinkers, in an interview, ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’, in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992). Again, the canon is a subject that has generated a great deal of controversy. In addition to the Leavis and Eliot material already mentioned, this is a small selection of accessible books on the subject: ·· Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (London: Macmillan, 1995) • Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982) • John Guillory, Cultural Capital (London: University of Chicago Press, 1993) • Robert von Hallberg (ed.), Canons (London: University of Chicago Press, 1984) • Barbara Herrstein Smith, Contingencies of Virtue (London: Harvard University Press, 1988) • Frank Kermode, The Classic (London: Harvard University Press, 1983) • Ankhi Mukherjee, Professor What Is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013) ·· Robert Scholes, Textual Power (London: Yale University Press, 1985)

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A good anthology of writers on this issues is Lee Morrissey (ed.), Debating the Canon: A Reader from Addison to Nafisi (London: Palgrave Macmillan,2005). The citation from Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike comes from The Decolonization of African Literature (Wash­ ington: Howard University Press, 1983). Toni Morrison is quoted from ‘Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature’, Michigan Quarterly Review 27(1) (1989): 1–34. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) is a witty discussion of the canon and the ‘culture wars’, and his comments are cited from Contemporary African American Literature: The Living Canon, edited by Lovalerie King and Shirley Moody-Turner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 7 Castle Shakespeare Here is just a very small selection of books relevant to the debates outlined in this chapter: ·· Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (London: Picador, 1997) • Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985) • Malcolm Evans, Signifying Nothing: Truth’s True Contents in Shakes­ peare’s Texts (Harvester: Brighton, 1986) • Terence Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1992) • Terence Hawkes, That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process (London: Methuen, 1986) • Graham Holderness (ed.), The Shakespeare Myth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). This includes David Hornbrook’s article, ‘“Go Play, Boy, Play”: Shakespeare and Educational Drama’. • Sean McEvoy, Shakespeare: The Basics (London: Routledge, 2000) • Neema Parvini, Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012) • Kiernan Ryan, Shakespeare, 3rd edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002) ·· Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (London: Hogarth Press, 1989) The quotations from Fay Weldon are in Letters to Alice, on First Reading Jane Austen (see previously, under Introduction), pages 11–20. Ludwig

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Wittgenstein discusses Shakespeare in Culture and Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998 edition). The article by John Yandell is ‘Reading Shakespeare, or Ways with Will’, in Changing English 4(2) (1997): 277–294. ‘New Historicists’ and ‘Presentists’: James Shapiro is the author of the widely celebrated 1599, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (London: Faber and Faber 2005). Among Stephen Greenblatt’s many stylish and readable books are Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) and Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004). An admirable introduction is Stephen Greenblatt is by Mark Robson (London: Routledge, 2008). Terence Hawkes edited a collection called Shakespeare in the Present (London: Routledge, 2002) as well as a series called ‘Accents on Shakespeare’ from Routledge, which explores all sorts of new angles in this field. Ewan Fernie writes powerfully on ‘Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism’, too, in Writing about Shakespeare (Shakespeare Survey 58) ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005): I’ve quoted from both of these. Fernie, too, with Simon Palfrey, edits a series of short, accessible and polemical books called Shakespeare Now! Ayanna Thompson’s book, Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (New York; Oxford University Press, 2011) is powerful and accessible. Emma Smith is the author of The Cambridge Shakespeare Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) and, with Laurie Maguire, the highly entertaining and informative 30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). Good recent discussions of adaptations are in Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin (eds) Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation (New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and Lukas Erne’s book is Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). The now infamous business book is Norman Augustine and Kenneth Adelman Shakespeare in Charge: The Bard’s Guide to Leading and Succeeding on the Business Stage (New York: Hyperion-Talk-Miramax, 1999), and The Shakespeare File: What English Majors Are Really Studying: A Report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (1996) is a polemical account of some of the issues I have discussed. It would be fair to say that writing on Shakespeare has led to some of the most beautiful and interesting critical prose; a really good example is the very moving and perceptive introduction by Jonathan Bate to a new edition of Shakespeare’s Complete Works: The RSC Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (eds) (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007).

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8  The author is dead? The essays to which I refer are: Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ (equally interesting and perhaps more useful is his essay ‘From Work to Text’); Michel Foucault ‘What Is an Author?’; and W. K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’. All these, and a great deal more relevant material, are included in an excellent reader edited by Seán Burke, Authorship from Plato to the Postmodern (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995). Burke has also written two very good studies of this issue that are critical of the ‘death of the author’ idea: The Death and Return of the Author (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992) and The Ethics of Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008). An outstanding, if demanding, account of these issues of authorial intention is Kaye Mitchell, Intention and Text (London: Continuum, 2008). Andrew Bennett discusses the author interestingly and clearly in The Author (London: Routledge, 2005). 9  Metaphors and figures of speech Perhaps the most significant and accessible recent work on metaphor has been carried out by George Lakoff and Mark Turner, sometimes in collaboration. Many of the ideas and examples in this chapter are drawn from their work. Especially good, and highly recommended, is More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (London: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Other works include George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (London: University of Chicago Press, 1980) and George Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind (London: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Also interesting on this is a reader edited by Deborah Cameron, The Feminist Critique of Language (London: Routledge, 1998 edition). More complex, but very rewarding, is Jacques Derrida’s essay, ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, in Margins of Philosophy (London: Harvester, 1982). Slightly at a tangent to all this, but still about the power of language, is J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1962). This is a very famous and influential account of language use. At the beginning he writes that ‘What I shall have to say here is neither difficult nor contentious’, and – amazingly – that’s (mostly) true. It’s not long, either.

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10  Narrative and closure There is a great deal of material on narrative and narratology, but less on closure. A very good starting point is H. Porter Abbot’s Narrative in the Cambridge Introduction series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Routledge, 1990) is exhaustive but (perhaps) a little dull. An excellent selection of key texts, which covers previous developments like Propp as well as new ideas on this topic, is The Narrative Reader, edited by Martin McQuillan (London: Routledge, 2000). The best example of ‘narratology’ in full flow is Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane E. Leavis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). A more demanding but worthwhile book on narrative is Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (London: Harvard University Press, 1992). Frank Kermode’s oblique, beautiful and significant book on closure, The Sense of an Ending, has been reprinted recently (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 11  Creative writing and critical rewriting There is a growing list of books that explore or argue over creative writing and its role. D. G. Myers, The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), is a rewarding history of the history of creative writing, mainly in the United States. The title comes from a remark made when the novelist Vladimir Nabakov (1899–1977) was offered a chair (a Professorship) in literature at Harvard; the famous linguist Roman Jacobson (1896–1982) asked ‘what next? Shall we appoint elephants to teach zoology?’ Mark McGurl The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, Mass; London: Harvard University Press, 2009) is another well-regarded history. Ben Knights and Chris Thurgar-Dawson’s Active Reading: Transformative Writing in Literary Studies (London: Continuum, 2006) is an insightful book, from which I have drawn much. It offers a clear argument about the importance of innovative practice in teaching English and an array of examples and case studies. Its aim is to fill the ‘woeful gap between the sublime theoretical possibilities and the actual teaching practice’ in English analysed by Rob Pope in his 1995 Textual Intervention: Critical and Creative Strategies for Literary Studies (London: Routledge, 1995).

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Paul Dawson, Creative Writing and the New Humanities (London: Routledge, 2005), is also a history and an argument about the subject, concluding that the creative writer is in a position to be a radical public intellectual. Angela Carter’s comments come from Jenny Uglow (ed.), Shaking a Leg (London: Chatto and Windus, 1997), one of the best and most interesting collections of non-fiction by a twentieth-century British novelist, which it is a joy simply to browse through. The fantastic Facebook Pride and Prejudice is at http://www.much-ado.net/austenbook/. Douglas Cowie is the author of Owen Noone and the Marauder (2005), Tin Pan Alley (2013), Away, You Rolling River (2014) and Noon in Paris, Eight in Chicago (Brighton: Myriad Editions, 2016). Geoffrey Hartman’s words come from his Criticism in the Wilderness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980); his own creativity is described in his autobiography A Scholar’s Tale (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). For a different, perhaps more amusingly cynical view of English and creative writing, you might want to look at Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members (New York: Doubleday, 2014). 12  English, politics and identity This is a huge and growing area. One of the most important books here is Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised and extended edition (London: Verso, 1991). The work of Homi Bhabha is often hard, but very rewarding; see his edited collection Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990) or his more challenging essays, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). I quote from an essay called ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation’, which appears in both these. Salman Rushdie’s reflections in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta Books, in association with Penguin, 1991) are also very illuminating (the citation from Rushdie is from an essay called ‘In Good Faith’). For linked accounts of similar issues, see the ground-breaking work by the critic Edward Said, including his justly celebrated Orientalism (London: Pantheon Books, 1978) and its follow-up, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994). Edward Said also writes very interestingly on politics, especially in his collection The World, The Text and The Critic (London: Faber and Faber, 1984).Also very illuminating in this area is the work of Paul Gilroy, especially his Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line

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(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), which refuses to duck any of the hard issues that these debates generate; and After Empire (London: Routledge, 2004). The citations from Robert Young come from his exhaustive Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). Raymond Williams is cited from Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Croom Helm, 1976). 13  Why study English? There is a really superb online collection of articles on the state of the ­humanities here: andreakastontange.wordpress.com/soh-articles/ . You can find both Paul Jay and Gerald Graff, ‘Fear of Being Useful’ (2012) and Michael Bérubé, ‘The Humanities, Declining?’ (2013) there. I’ve also drawn on Helen Small, The Value of the Humanities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) and on Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). Rónán McDonald’s edited collection The Value of Literary Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) is also very illuminating. Rick Rylance, Literature and the Public Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) makes a very strong case for the importance of literary study in the contemporary world. Well worth a quick look is the UK government’s Quality Assurance Agency document ‘Subject Benchmark Statement for English’: it’s here http://www.qaa.ac.uk/en/Publications/Documents/SBS-English-15.pdf Conclusion Harold Rosen’s ‘Neither Bleak House nor Liberty Hall: English in the Curriculum’ from 1981 is a bit dated now, but is a sterling statement of principles; the lecture and more by him is in John Richmond, Harold Rosen: Writings on Life, Language and Learning 1958 to 2008 (London: Institute of Education Press, 2017). Hannah Arendt is cited from The Human Condition (London: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Simon Swift’s Hannah Arendt (London: Routledge, 2008) is a great introduction to her work for literature students.

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Index

10 Things I hate about you 70 Abbott, H. Porter 166 Abrams, M. H. 160 Accountancy 144, 145 Achebe, Chinua 138 Achilles 103, 104 Adam and Eve 13 Adelman, Kenneth 73, 165 A-Level 3, 7, 8, 40, 41, 65, 66 American Council of Trustees and Alumni 73, 165 Analepsis 113 Anderson, Benedict , 133, 134 Anderson, Benedict168 Angelou, Maya 73, 128 Animal farm 102 Animism 102 anthology, original meaning 62 anthropomorphism 102 Arendt, Hannah 155, 169 Aristotle 43, 163 Arkin, Graham 73 Armstrong, Katherine 73 Arnold, Matthew 16, 19, 160; Culture and Anarchy 16 Assessment criteria for creative writing 123, 124

Assessment objectives 42 Atherton, Carol 158 Attridge, Derek 163 Augustine, Norman, 73, 165 Austen, Jane 23, 64, 76, 92, 96, 115, 122,136 Austin, J. L. 166 Author–function 99 authorial intention xviii, 89–100 Autobiographical criticism 92 Ayres, David 160 Bacon, Francis 12, Baldick, Chris 158 Balkans 134 Barry, Peter 160 Barthes, Roland, 90. 95, 100, 165 Basic conceptual metaphors 105–6 Bastille day 135 Bate Jonathan 71, 72, 77, 80, 164, 165 Batman 113 Beardsley, Monroe 90, 94 166 Beaumont, Francis 75 Beckett, Samuel 99 Behn, Aphra 99 Bell, Michael 159 Belles Lettres 14, 23

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INDEX

Bennett, Andrew 160, 166 Bentham, Jeremy 142 Bergonzi, Bernard 159 Berlant, Laurent 139 Bertens, Hans 160 Bérubé, Michael 169 Bestseller 51 Bhabha, Homi 135, 168 Bible 15, 72 Biography 12, 51, 58 Biology, biologists 7 Blake, William, 61 Bleiman, Barbara 42, 161 Bloom, Harold 65, 163 Booth, Wayne 159 Breaking Bad 76 Brexit 133, 134 Briar Rose 112 Bristol, Michael British Empire 15, 16, 24, 76 Brooks, Peter 167 Brown, James 104 Burke, Seán 166 Burney, Frances 96 Burns, Robert 104 Cain, William E. 160 Caliban 80 Cameron, Deborah canon 140 Canon xviii, 23, 24, 26, 57–8 Carter, Angela 121,167 Catholic Church 60 Caxton, William 97 Cervantes, Miguel de 85 Césaire, Aimé 80 Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra 18 Chaucer, Geoffrey 94, 97 Chemistry 6,7, 23, 35, 44 Cheshire 71 China 83 Chinweizu 63; Toward the Decolonisation of African Literature, 163 Christie, Agatha 97 Cinderella 112 Ciphers 93

172

Civil War 75 Civilizing mission 24, 26 Clancy, Tom 97 Close reading 21, 23, 44, 49 Closure 116–18 Collini, Stefan 158 Collins, John Churton 19, 159 Columbia 133 Computer games 45 Congo 114 Conrad, Joseph 64, 114, 115; Heart of Darkness 114, 115 Council of Trent 60 Cowie, Cowie 168 Cowie, Doug 124 Creative writing xviii, 6, 50, 99, 119–26 Creative writing workshops 124 Critical rewriting 50, 122–6 Cromwell, Oliver 75 Cruel Optimism 139 Culler, Jonathan 160, 163 Cultural capital 142 Cultural heritage 135 Cultural materialist/materialism 73, 78, 81, 85 Cultural politics 131, 132, 139 Culture Wars 3, 32, Dante 105 Darwinism 99 Dawson, Paul 125, 167 Day, Gary 159 De Vega, Lope 77 Dead Metaphor 105 Deborah Cameron 166 Defamiliarisation 104 Deleuze, Gilles 107 Democracy xvi, 143 Derrida, Jacques 108, 163, 166 Desai, Anita 138 Desert Island Discs 72 Dickens, Charles 44, 136 Diegetic 113 Digital criticism 51, 52 Disciplinary Consciousness xviii, 35, 37–8, 41–6, 145, 153, 161, 162; as script 37

INDEX

DNA 134, as metaphor 13, 157 Dodson, Polly 125 Dollimore. Jonathan 164 Don Quixote 84 Doyle, Brian 158 During, Simon, 22, 159 Eagleton, Terry 26, 28, 161 Earth as a spaceship 107 East India Company 15 Eco criticism 51, 52 Eden 13, 80 Egypt 12 Eliot T. S.20, 24, 62, 63, 76, 160, 163; ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ 62, Eliot, George 23, 64 Elizabeth I 136 Elsa, from Frozen 102 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 73 Empson, Sir William 20, 159 England 15, 16, 134 English Education Act 16 Englisher 7, 156 Environment 152 Erne, Lucas 84, 165 Ethnic cleansing 134 ethos 130 European Union 134 Evans, Malcolm 164 Evans, Maurice 77 Extrinsic attitude 47, 48, 50–3, 131 Facebook 112, 122, 133,168 Felski, Rita 32, 161 Feminist, Feminism 30, 51, 52, 152 Fernie, Ewan 84, 165 Fictocriticism 125 Figural language xviii, 101–10 Finding Dory 102 Finding Nemo 102 Finke, Laurie A. 160 First-person Narrator 90, 95, 99, 114 Flash-back 113 Flash-forward 113 Fletcher, John 75, 84

Focalisation 115 Formalism 48, 52 Foucault, Michael 99, 166 Fowler, Alastair 163 Freud, Sigmund, 51 Frost, Robert , 105 Frozen 102 Galbraith, Robert 97 Game of Thrones 76 Gardiner, Michael 62, 158 Gates, Henry Louis 67, 164 Gender Studies 28 Generic conventions 113 Genette, Gérard 113, 67 Genre, 60, 113 Geographers, geography xviii, 12, 35, 38 Geometry 6 G. I. Hamlet 77 Giles, Judy 159 Gilroy, Paul 168 Giovanelli, Marcello 41, 161 Global literature 152 Gotham 113 Graff, Gerald 18, 146, 158, 159, 169 Greek 12, 16, 19, 60, 63, 102, 103, 130 Green, Andrew 158 Greenblatt, Stephen, 83, 125, 165 Guillory, John 163 Guy Fawkes Night 135 Habib, M. A. R. 161 Harpham, Geoffrey Galt 158, 160 Harry Potter 12, 98 Hartley, L. P. 104 Hartman, Geoffrey 125 , 168 Hattie, John 5, 45, 158 Hawkes, Terence 79, 164, 165 Hebrew Scriptures 60 Hermeneutics 30, 31, 33, Heuristic 122 Historicism 50, 52 History, historians 7, 12, 28, 30, 35, 58 Holderness, Graham 164 Holland, Peter 165 Hollywood 83

173

INDEX

Holmes, Sherlock 67, 122 Homer 62 Hornbrook, David, 80, 164 Huang, Alexa 165 Hyperbole 102 Iambic verse 44 Imagines communities 133, 139 Independence day 135 India 15, 16, 18,19 Industrial Revolution 97 International Baccalaureate 3 Intertextuality 122 intrinsic artistic worth 24, 26, 27, Intrinsic attitude 47, 50, 52, 53,131, 132 Ireland 15, 112 Irony 102 J. Williams Jeffrey 160 Jacobson, Roman 167 James, Henry 23, 64, 116, 117 Jamshidi, Kathryn 40, 42, 161 Jargon 35, 44 Jaschik, Scott 162 Jay, Paul 146, 169 Jemie, Onwuchekwa 63; The Decolonisation of African Literature, 63, 163 Johnson, Barbara E. 160 Johnson, Mark 166 Johnson, Robert , 105 Jonson, Ben 72, 75, Joyce, James 112 Kenya 133 Kermode 116, 117, 160, 163, 167 King, Lovalerie 164 King, Stephen 97 Knights, Ben 17, 37, 123, 151, 158, 161, 167 Kyd, Thomas 82 Lacan, Jacques 51 Lakoff, George 103, 104, 106, 166 Latin 14, 16, Lawrie, Alexandra 17, 158 Leach, Susan 82

174

Leavis, F. R. 21–6, 62–4, 142, 159, 163 Leavis, Q. D., 21–5, 62, 64, 159 Leitch, Vincent 32, 160 Life ‘as a journey’ 105–7 Linguistics 12, 18, 28 Literary Criticism xvii, 6, 17, 18–24, 26, 27, 32, 36, 37, 49–52, 53, 65, 121, 124, 125, 139, 145, 151 Literary History 18 Literary Theory xvii, 8, 17, 25–33, 35, 41, 117, 121, 123, 136, 137, 145, 152, 154, 160; absence of a ‘Grand Unifying Theory of Everything’ 30 Literature ‘with a capital L’ 30, 58, 59, 66, 68 Logos 130 London 15, 49 Los Santos 15 Lynch Deidra Shauna 32, 161 M6 71 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 16; Minute on Indian Education 16 MacIntyre, Alasdair 161 MacKillop Ian, 159 Madubuike, Ihechukwu 63; The Decolonisation of African Literature, 63, 163 Maguire, Laurie 165 Marlow, from Heart of Darkness 114 Marxism 28, 99 Mason, Jessica 41, 161 Mathematics, Mathematicians xviii, 35, 38 May, Steve 120 McDonald Rónán159, 161, 169 McEvoy, Sean 164 McGowan, John 160 McGurl, Mark 167 McQuillan, Martin 167 Menand, Louis, 20, 144, 158, Metacognition xviii, 3, 45 Metaphors 101, 103–9 metonymy 102 Michael, Warner 158 Middleton, Tim 159 Milton, John 61, 92, 95

INDEX

Mimetic 57 Mitchell, Kaye 166 Moody-Turner, Shirley, 164 Moretti, Franco 43 Morrison, Toni 66, 164 Morrissey, Lee 163 Moulton, Richard 17, 20, Mukherjee, Ankhi 163 Mulhern, Francis 159 Munday, Anthony 82 Myers D. G., 167 Nabakov, Vladimir 167 Napoleonic Wars 16 Narrative xviii, 111–18 Narratology 113 Narrators third person 114 Narrators, first person 114 Narrators, omniscient 114–15 Narrators, unreliable 114 National Curriculum 71 NATO 134 Nettleship, Sir Henry 17, 159 New Historicists, 83, 165 Newbolt, Sir Henry 24; Newbolt Report 24, 159 Nietzsche, Friedrich 108, 109 Northern Ireland 134 Number 10, 102 Nussbaum, Martha 143, 144, 155, 169 Objectification 44 Ogborn, Jane 161 Old English 17 Old German 14, 17 Old Norse 16 Onwuchekwa, Jemie 63 Ortberg, Mallory 122 Orwell, George 102; Animal Farm, 102 Palfrey, Simon 165 Palgrave, Francis Turner 61, 62; Golden Treasury of English Verse 61–2 Parvini, Neema 164 Pathetic Fallacy 102 Pathos 130 Pericles 103, 104

Philology, philologists 12, 14, ,17, 18, 23, 60 Philosophical criticism 51, 52 Philosophy 23, 28, Pirates of the Caribbean 15 Poirot, Hercule 67 Polis 129, 130 Political reading 51, 52 Pope, Rob 167 Pound, Ezra 59 Pratchett, Terry 130 Presentism, 84, 165 Prince Charming 112 Prolepsis 113 Propp, Vladimir 112, 113,167, Prosopopoeia 102 Prospero 80 Psychoanalysis 50, Pushpin 142 Pynchon, Thomas, Quality Assurance Agency 146, 169 Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur 19 Racism 134 Rasmussen, Eric 165 Reading, as active process 5, 9, 152–3 Reading, shaped by presuppositions 5 Reification 44 Renaissance, xviii, 60 Rhetoric 13, 14, 18, 20, 23, 130 Richards I. A. 17, 19, 159 Richmond, John 169 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith 166 Rivkin, Julie 160 Rivlin, Elizabeth 165 Robson, Mark 165 Roman 12, 19, 60, 63 Romantic movement 98, 120 Rosen, Harold , 153, 169 Rowling, J. K. 97 Royal Shakespeare company 71, 79 Royle, Nicholas 160 Rushdie, Salman , 137, 168 Ryan, Kiernan 164, 73 Ryan, Michael 160 Rylance, Rick 169

175

INDEX

Said, Edward 168 Samson, Anne 159 Saxon 14 Scholes Robert 163 Schumacher, Julie 168 Science Fiction fandom 45 Scotland 15, 134 Scott, Patrick 39, 161 Scottish Universities 16 Scrutiny 22 Shakespeare, William xv, xviii, 12, 13, 19, 20, 21, 44, 50, 61, 67–85, 91, 102, 122, 125, 131, 138; All’s well that ends well 82; As You Like It 73; Double falsehood 85 Cardenio 82, 84; Hamlet 73, 77; Henry V 77; Henry VIII 82; Julius Caesar 70, 84; King Lear 50, 73; Macbeth 143; Measure for Measure 82; The Merchant of Venice 73, 84; Othello 41, 91; Pericles 82; Richard II 79; Romeo and Juliet 70, 79 ; The Taming of the Shrew 70, 122; The Tempest 80 Shapiro, James, 83, 165 Sharpley-Whiting,T. Denean 160 Shelley, Mary 42, Frankenstein 42 Sidney, Sir Phillip 61, 148 Simile 103, 104 Sinfield, Alan 164 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 97 Skills xvi, xvii, 3, 141–9; subject knowledge 146, skill specific for English 146 graduate and generic skills 147 Small, Helen 143, 169 Smith, Barbara Herrstein 160, 163 Smith, Emma 84, 165 Snow White 112 Sociology 12, 28, 44, 58 Sonnet 119 Sophocles 77 Spenser, Sir Edmund 61 Spoilers 115, 116 SpongeBob 113 Springfield 113 St Pauls Cathedral 75 Staffordshire 71

176

Star Wars 67 Steel, Danielle, 97 STEM subjects 149 Subtext 44 Swift, Simon 169 Swinburne, Algernon 76 Synecdoche 102 Taylor, Gary 75, 79, 164 The Crown 76 The Fault in our Stars 70 The Great Gatsby 113 The Hobbit 144 The Lord of the Rings 144 The Simpsons 113 The Wire 76 Thinking as a Critic xviii, 3, 7, 43, 46 Third-person Narrator 114, 115 Thompson, Ayanna , 82, 83, 165 Thurber, James 114 Thurgar-Dawson, Chris, 123, 151, 167 Tillyard, E. M. W. 19, 20, 159 Tolkien, J. R. R. 144 Toy Story 102 Tropes 102 Turner, James 158 Turner, Mark 103, 105, 106, 166 Underwood, Ted 14, 158 United Nations 134 University Extension Movement 17 University of Cambridge 17, 19, 21, 23, 24 University of Chicago 17 University of London 14, 16 University of Oxford 17 University of Sheffield 40 Upstone, Sara 160 Utilitarianism 142 Victoria 136 Viswanathan, Gauri 18, 158 von Hallberg, Robert 163 Wales, Welsh 15, 134 Walker, Alice 138 Wallace, David Foster 157

INDEX

Wandor, Michelene , 121 Warren, Austin 48, 162, 163; Theory of Literature 48 Warton, Joseph 61 Warwickshire 71 Webster, Lucy 42, 161 Weldon, Fay 69, 70 , 80, 164; Letters to Alice, on First Reading Jane Austen 69, Wellek, Rene 48, 162, 163; Theory of Literature 48 Wellmon, Chad 162 Wellmon, Chad 162 Wikipedia 40 Williams, John 20, 21, 159 Williams, Raymond 134, 168 Willingham, Bill 112

Wilson, J. Dover 160 Wimsatt, W. K. 90, 94, 166 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 32, 77, 151, 161, 164 Wollstonecraft, Mary 13 Women’s Studies 28 Wood, Michael 159 Words on the page 21, 49, 52, 53 Wordsworth, William 49 World War I 19, 20, 24 World War II 78 Yandell, John 71, 164 York Notes 40 Young, Robert 130, 168 YouTube 41, 66

177